2024-11-27

Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 4: Did Jesus Exist?

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Previous posts in this series:

  1. Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 1: Historical Facts and Probability
  2. Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History
  3. Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 3: Prediction and History


* For an excellent introduction to Bayes‘ approach to problem solving read Sharon McGrayne’s  The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. In brief, McGrayne explains the essence of the approach of Bayes thus, as applied to a person with his back to billiard table figuring out where a ball had stopped:

Next, he devised a thought experiment, a 1700s version of a computer simulation. Stripping the problem to its basics, Bayes imagined a square table so level that a ball thrown on it would have the same chance of landing on one spot as on any other. Subsequent generations would call his construction a billiard table, but as a Dissenting minister Bayes would have disapproved of such games, and his experiment did not involve balls bouncing off table edges or colliding with one another. As he envisioned it, a ball rolled randomly on the table could stop with equal probability anywhere.

We can imagine him sitting with his back to the table so he cannot see anything on it. On a piece of paper he draws a square to represent the surface of the table. He begins by having an associate toss an imaginary cue ball onto the pretend tabletop. Because his back is turned, Bayes does not know where the cue ball has landed.

Next, we picture him asking his colleague to throw a second ball onto the table and report whether it landed to the right or left of the cue ball. If to the left, Bayes realizes that the cue ball is more likely to sit toward the right side of the table. Again Bayes’ friend throws the ball and reports only whether it lands to the right or left of the cue ball. If to the right, Bayes realizes that the cue can’t be on the far right-hand edge of the table.

He asks his colleague to make throw after throw after throw; gamblers and mathematicians already knew that the more times they tossed a coin, the more trustworthy their conclusions would be. What Bayes discovered is that, as more and more balls were thrown, each new piece of information made his imaginary cue ball wobble back and forth within a more limited area.

As an extreme case, if all the subsequent tosses fell to the right of the first ball, Bayes would have to conclude that it probably sat on the far left-hand margin of his table. By contrast, if all the tosses landed to the left of the first ball, it probably sat on the far right. Eventually, given enough tosses of the ball, Bayes could narrow the range of places where the cue ball was apt to be.

Bayes’ genius was to take the idea of narrowing down the range of positions for the cue ball and—based on this meager information—infer that it had landed somewhere between two bounds. This approach could not produce a right answer. Bayes could never know precisely where the cue ball landed, but he could tell with increasing confidence that it was most probably within a particular range. Bayes’ simple, limited system thus moved from observations about the world back to their probable origin or cause. Using his knowledge of the present (the left and right positions of the tossed balls), Bayes had figured out how to say something about the past (the position of the first ball). He could even judge how confident he could be about his conclusion. (p. 7)

In the late 1990s Earl Doherty revitalized public interest in the question of whether Jesus had been a historical figure with the Jesus Puzzle website (a new version is now available here) and book, The Jesus Puzzle (link is to a publicly available version — though Doherty subsequently published a much more detailed volume a few years later). In the wake of that controversy Richard Carrier undertook to examine the arguments for and against the existence of Jesus with the authority of a doctorate in ancient history behind him. To this end, Carrier initially published two works, the first, Proving History, laying the groundwork of the method he would be using to address the question of Jesus’ historicity, and then On the Historicity of Jesus, the volume in which he applied his Bayesian probability* approach to the question. In that second volume Carrier concluded that the odds against Jesus having existed were significantly higher than the opposing view.

Carrier regularly argued that the evidence to be found in the New Testament was predicted or could well have been predicted by the hypothesis that Jesus did not exist. As noted in my previous post, the term he used most often was “expected”, but he made clear in Proving History by “expectation” in this context he meant “predicted”.

Prediction or Circularity?

It would have been more accurate to have simply said that the evidence cited is consistent with the view that Jesus did not exist. The hypothesis did not “predict” any evidence. Indeed, one might even say that the hypothesis was drawn from the sources in the first place, so it is circular logic to then say that the hypothesis predicted the evidence that gave rise to that hypothesis.

Carrier’s stated aim is to form a

hypotheses that make[s] … substantial predictions. This will give us in each case a mini­mal theory, one that does not entail any ambitious or questionable claims . . . a theory substantial enough to test. (On the Historicity [henceforth = OHJ], 30 – bolding is my own in all quotations)

I argue, rather, that all Carrier has been able to accomplish is to show that a hypothesis is consistent with the data that it was created to explain. Historical research, as I have been attempting to show in the previous posts, cannot “predict” in the ways Carrier asserts.

Carrier begins with a “minimal Jesus myth theory”:

. . . the basic thesis of every competent mythicist, then and now, has always been that Jesus was originally a god, just like any other god (properly speaking, a demigod in pagan terms; an archangel in Jewish terms; in either sense, a deity), who was later historicized, just as countless other gods were, and that the Gospel of Mark (or Mark’s source) originated the Christian myth familiar to us by building up an edifying and symbolically meaningful tale for Jesus, drawing on passages from the Old Testament and popular literature, coupled with elements of revelation and pious inspiration. The manner in which Osiris came to be historicized, moving from being just a cosmic god to being given a whole narrative biography set in Egypt during a specific histor­ical period, complete with collections of wisdom sayings he supposedly uttered, is still an apt model, if not by any means an exact one. Which is to say, it establishes a proof of concept. It is in essence what all mythicists are saying happened to Jesus.

Distilling all of this down to its most basic principles we get the follow­ing set of propositions:

1. At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other.

2. Like many other celestial deities, this Jesus ‘communicated’ with his subjects only through dreams, visions and other forms of divine inspi­ration (such as prophecy, past and present).

3. Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm.

4. As for many other celestial deities, an allegorical story of this same Jesus was then composed and told within the sacred community, which placed him on earth, in history, as a divine man, with an earthly family, companions, and enemies, complete with deeds and sayings, and an earthly depiction of his ordeals.

5. Subsequent communities of worshipers believed (or at least taught) that this invented sacred story was real (and either not allegorical or only ‘additionally’ allegorical).

That all five propositions are true shall be my minimal Jesus myth theory. (OHJ 52f)

By explaining that his “minimal myth theory” consists of the core of what Jesus myth exponents themselves have claimed, Carrier in fact is conceding that his “minimal” points are based on the information available in the sources that he will proceed to say he will “expect” to find, or to “predict” will be in the sources. (Earl Doherty, in particular, was Carrier’s source for the interpretation that Jesus was originally understood to be a deity in heaven rather than a man on earth.)

Now those mythicists such as Earl Doherty arrived at their concept of a mythical Jesus in large measure as a result of analysing and drawing conclusions directly from the New Testament itself as well as from extra-biblical sources. So when Carrier declares that the evidence in the New Testament is what his “minimal Jesus myth theory” “expected” or “predicted”, he is in effect reasoning in a circle. The mythicist view of Doherty (and of many other earlier mythicists) was based on his reading of the New Testament. So the passages in the New Testament can hardly have been what would be “expected” according to mythicism; rather, they were the beginning of the “theory”, not its expected conclusion.

The approach as Carrier sets it out sounds scientific enough ….

We have to ask of each piece of evidence:

1. How likely is it that we would have this evidence if our hypothesis is true? (Is this evidence expected? How expected?)

2. How likely is it that the evidence would look like it does if our hypothesis is true? (Instead of looking differently; having a different content, for example.)

3. Conversely, how likely is it that we would have this evidence if the other hypothesis is true? (Again, is this evidence expected? How expected?)

4. And how likely is it that the evidence would look like it does if that other hypothesis is true? (Instead of looking differently; having a different content, for example.)

And when asking these questions, the ‘evidence’ includes not just what we have, but also what we don’t have. Does the evidence—what we have and what we don’t, what it says and what it doesn’t—make more sense on one hypothesis than the other? How much more? That’s the question. (OHJ, 278)

But the problem is that all of those questions were raised and fully addressed by Earl Doherty and others when they formulated their view that, on the basis of their answers to those questions, Jesus was a mythical creation and not a historical figure. So to turn around and begin with the conclusions of mythicists to say that the evidence we find in the New Testament is exactly what we would expect according to mythicism, is to simply work backwards from what the mythicists have done in the first place.

In other words, there is no prediction of what one might find in the evidence. There is no “expectation” that we might find such and such sort of idea. Rather, the sources themselves have long raised the kinds of questions that have led to the mythicist theory in the first place.

Example 1: Clement’s Letter

Look at the example of Carrier’s reference to the letter of 1 Clement:

The fact that this lengthy document fully agrees with the expectations of minimal mythicism, but looks very strange on any version of historicity, makes this evidence for the former against the latter. . . . [O]n minimal mythicism this is exactly the kind of letter we would expect to be written in the first century entails that its consequent probability on mythicism is 100% (or near enough). (OHJ, 314f – italics in the original in all quotations)

But Doherty’s mythicist view was shaped by such evidence. So the characteristics of Clement’s letter are what lay behind the mythicist view, so it is erroneous to say that the letter is what we would expect if mythicism were true. Doherty, for example, notes

Clement must be unfamiliar with Jesus’ thoughts in the same vein, as presented in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Clement also shows himself to be unfamiliar with the Gospel teachings of Jesus on many other topics discussed in his letter.

When Clement comes to describe Jesus’ suffering (ch.16) we must assume that he has no Gospel account to paraphrase or quote from memory, for he simply reproduces Isaiah 53. His knowledge of Jesus’ passion comes from scripture. Clement’s ignorance on other Gospel elements has been noted at earlier points in this book. . . .

Since Clement knows so little of oral traditions about Jesus . . . .

We have seen in the Pauline letters that the heavenly Christ was regarded as giving instructions to prophets through revelation. Clement shares in the outlook that sees Christ’s voice as residing in scripture. . . .

In Clement’s world, these things have come to be associated with revelations from the spiritual Christ. . . (Jesus Puzzle, 261f)

The oddities in the letter of Clement have piqued the curiosity of those who have seen in them support for the mythicist view of Jesus. The mythicist view of Jesus does not “predict” that such a letter would exist. It is the other way around.

Example 2: Extra-Biblical Sources

Notice another instance of this circularity.

When it came to the pervasive silence in other external documents (Chris­tian and non-Christian), and the lack of many otherwise expected docu­ments, I assigned no effect either way (although sterner skeptics might think that far too generous to minimal historicity). . . .

The probabilities here estimated assume that nothing about the extrabibli­cal evidence is unexpected on minimal mythicism. So the consequent prob­ability of all this extrabiblical evidence on … (minimal mythicism) can be treated as 100% across the board . . . . Either way, as a whole, the extrabiblical evidence argues against a historical Jesus. It’s simply hard to explain all its oddities on minimal historicity, but not hard at all on minimal mythicism. (OHJ, 356, 358)

On the contrary, it is the extra-biblical sources that have been in part responsible for generating doubts about the historicity of Jesus ever since at least the early nineteenth century. If the extra-biblical evidence were different then the question of Jesus’ historicity is unlikely to have arisen in the first place.

I have no quibble with Carrier’s last two sentences in the above quotation if they are taken alone, without the context of “expectation/prediction”. What they are really confirming is that the available evidence is consistent with the mythicist view, not that it is predicted by mythicism.

Example 3: Expected Fiction?

In discussing one particular miraculous event in the life of Jesus Carrier concludes:

As history, all this entails an improbable plethora of coincidences; but as historical fiction, it’s exactly what we’d expect. (OHJ, 487)

In this case what is said to be “expected” is nothing more than a definition of the nature of fiction. The unbelievable coincidences define the story as fiction. They are not the expected observation of something already known to be fiction. They are the fiction.

Example 4: Paul’s Letters

The foundation of all Jesus myth views from Arthur Drews and Paul-Louis Couchoud to George Albert Wells and Earl Doherty has been the epistles of Paul. The questions raised by what Paul does not say and the ways he speaks in what he has to say have raised perennial questions among theologians so there is no surprise to find many passages becoming  bedrock among mythicist arguments. So to say that those passages in Paul are what might be predicted by mythicism is getting everything back to front. Those passages are largely the foundation of the mythicist views, the port from which mythicism sailed, not the new continent of evidence it discovered or “expected”.

Again Carrier phrases the problem in terms of “prediction” of what one will find in the sources:

So even if, for example, a passage is 90% expected on history (and thus very probable in that case), if that same passage is 100% expected on myth, then that evidence argues for myth . . . . This is often hard for historians to grasp, because they typically have not studied logic and don’t usually know the logical basis for any of their modes of reasoning . . . .

I have to conclude the evidence of the Epistles, on all we presently know, is simply improbable on h (minimal historicity), but almost exactly what we expect on -h (minimal mythicism). . . . 

Paul claimed these things came to him by revelation, another thing we expect on mythicism. . . .

On the [mythicism] theory, this is pretty much exactly what we’d expect Paul to write. . . .

This passage in Romans is therefore improbable on minimal historicity, but exactly what we could expect on minimal mythicism. . . .

Whereas this is all 100% expected on minimal mythicism.

The evi­dence of the Epistles is exactly 100% expected on minimal mythicism. . . In fact, these are pretty much exactly the kind of letters we should expect to now have from Paul (and the other authors as well) if minimal mythicism is true.  (OHJ, 513, 528, 536, 566, 573, 574, 595)

Predicting or Matching the Evidence?

So Carrier is able to conclude,

All the evidence is effectively 100%, what we could expect if Jesus didn’t exist and minimal mythicism, as defined [above], is true. (OHJ, 597)

On the contrary, I suggest that many readers have noticed that the sources contain difficulties if we assume Jesus to have lived in the real world outside the gospels. It is from those “difficulties” that are apparently inconsistent with a historical figure that the Jesus myth view has arisen. By proposing to “test” the mythicist view by setting up “expectations” of what we will find in the sources really comes down to merely confirming the problematic passages in the sources that gave rise to the myth view in the first place.

What Carrier is doing, I suggest, is simply describing the sources that have given rise to doubts about the existence of Jesus. There is no prediction involved at all. He is describing the state of the evidence and showing how it is consistent with his “minimal Jesus myth theory”, something all other Jesus myth scholars before him have done — only without the veneer of scientific assurance.

Historians as a rule cannot predict what will be found in the available sources that might test their hypotheses. They usually do no more than point to what they believe to be consistent with their hypotheses.

The Rank-Raglan Hero Class and Prediction Therefrom

In the opening post of this series I addressed Carrier’s use of the Rank-Raglan “hero class” as a conceptual framework for certain types of persons in ancient myths and legends. There I noted that it is misleading to apply a percentage probability figure to Jesus (or anyone) being a member of that class because the total number of persons sharing the features of that class are well below 100. This is more than a pedantic point. The numbers of characters are not only limited, but they belong to distinctively unique cultural settings. This is the nature of all historical events. No two events are ever alike and no events are ever repeated except in the most general sense. Yes, there have been wars forever, but no two wars are ever alike. Each has had its own causes that are unrepeatable.

Here are the twenty-one names studied by Raglan as sharing a features (born from a virgin, nothing of his childhood is known, etc) from a second list of random length (Raglan said he could have added many more common features — see the earlier post):

  1. Oedipus
  2. Theseus
  3. Romulus
  4. Heracles
  5. Perseus
  6. Jason
  7. Bellerophon
  8. Pelops
  9. Asclepios
  10. Dionysos
  11. Apollo
  12. Zeus
  13. Joseph
  14. Moses
  15. Elijah
  16. Watu Gunung
  17. Nyikang
  18. Sigurd or Siegfried
  19. Llew Llawgyffes
  20. Arthur
  21. Robin Hood

We know that historical persons have been associated with mythical stories overlapping with the lives of those in the above list: Sargon, Cyrus, Alexander the Great, even Plato was said to have been born from a virgin mother, fathered by the god Apollo. But those mythical or “hero class” features of Cyrus and Alexander are quite distinct from the actual historical person; that fantastical myths have been told about real people makes no difference to the reality of those historical persons. As Raglan himself declared:

If, however, we take any really historical person, and make a clear distinction be­tween what history tells us of him and what tradition tells us, we shall find that tradition, far from being supplementary to history, is totally unconnected with it, and that the hero of history and the hero of tra­dition are really two quite different persons, though they may bear the same name. (The Hero, 165)

If historical persons are known to have accrued mythical features of the Rank-Raglan type, then it does not follow that any person about whom such tales are told is likely to have not existed in reality. Simply counting up so many features (e.g. born of a virgin, attempt on his life as a child, etc) and saying “real myths” had more of those features than historical persons does not make any difference. Adding up more “hero class” labels to apply to any one person would be nothing more than evidence of more highly creative composers. Moreover, such fanciful tales appear to be born from the minds of the literate at a specific time and are not haphazard accretions of illiterate storytelling:

If biblical scholars took note of Raglan’s point here about such myths being literary and not popular in origin they would need to take a second hard look at their attempts to find the historical Jesus through oral traditions and memory theory, since oral traditions and memory theory are built on the assumption that the tales were of popular origin.

It should . . . be noted that this association of myths with historical characters is literary and not popular. There is no evidence that illiterates ever attach myths to real persons. The mythical stories told of English kings and queens—Alfred and the cakes, Richard I and Blondel, Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund, Queen Margaret and the robber, and so on—seem to have been deliberately composed; a well-known charac­ter and an old story were considered more interesting when combined. . . .

“From the researchers of J. Bedier upon the epic personages of William of Orange, Girard de Rousillon, Ogier the Dane, Raoul de Cambrai, Roland, and many other worthies, it emerges that they do not correspond in any way with what historical documents teach us of their alleged real prototypes. (The Hero, 172, 174 — the latter citing A. van Gennep)

The conclusion we must draw is that the miraculous tales told about Jesus are at most evidence of the creative imaginations of literate classes. Whether a Jesus existed historically behind these tales is still quite possible and the mythical tales about him make no difference to that possibility. Tales are indeed told of historical persons that “do not correspond in any way” with the true historical figure. The only aspect in common seems to have been their name. If Jesus has more and more amazing tales told about him than others it follows that literate story tellers were more abundant or creative than for other figures. Such tales tell us nothing about the likelihood of his historicity.

I conclude that it is erroneous to use the Rank-Raglan hero class to indicate a prior probability of whether Jesus existed or not. Every situation in history is different. If the Greeks had many heroes of a certain type, and if the tales told about Jesus shared many tropes of those Greek heroes, it might mean nothing more than that very fanciful tales were told about Jesus that caused the “real Jesus” to be lost behind the world of myth. Many theologians would agree. In other words, the historian cannot make predictions based on probabilities to determine how likely any historical event or person might have been. Historical events and persons are contingent. They are all distinctive and unrepeatable. They either happen or exist or they do not. Or the researcher simply does not know if they did or not. Probability does not enter the discussion.

The Evidence: Expected or Known in Advance?

What Carrier calls “expected evidence” is, rather, a description of what has been with us (and Jesus myth researchers) from the beginning. The state of evidence gave rise to certain questions that led to suspicions that Jesus was not a historical figure. So returning to that evidence and saying that the myth notion “predicted” the state of that evidence is a misplaced project.

Try to imagine, if you can, that you have never heard of Christianity. Try to imagine what a new ancient religion would look like if it combined features of Greco-Roman mystery cults and some form of Judaism. If you had never heard of Christianity would you really imagine a religion that turned out to be very much like Christianity? I doubt it. You might postulate a series of angelic beings or just one of them, or a translated Enoch, in the distant mythical past turned into saviour deities in some fashion. You would surely see little reason to introduce a human deity in recent times. Yet Carrier concludes his major study on the historicity of Jesus with the conviction that his hypothesis predicted (or “could have predicted”) the beginnings of Christianity:

So we should actually have expected Jewish culture to find a way to integrate the same idea; after all, every other national culture was doing so. And this is where we have to look at the possibilities in light of what we now know. Had I been born in the year 1 and was asked as a young educated man what a Jewish mystery religion would look like, based on what I knew of the common features of mystery cult and the strongest features of Judaism, I could have described Christianity to you in almost every relevant particular—before it was even invented. It would involve the worship of a mythical-yet-historicized per­sonal savior, a son of god, who suffered a death and resurrection, by which he obtained salvation for those who communed with his spirit, thereby becoming a fictive brotherhood, through baptism and the sharing of sacred meals. How likely is it that I could predict that if that wasn’t in fact how it came to pass? Influence is the only credible explanation. To propose it was a coincidence is absurd. (OHJ, 611)

It is very easy to predict the current state of the evidence that has been with us from the beginning. Prediction in hindsight is easy. It is so easy to know what to have expected after the event. We only have to compare the many predictions that the recent US elections would be a tight race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. After the election it was easy to look back and see what we “should have expected” and why.

Jesus either existed or he did not. If he existed it was not with a probability of less than 1. If he existed he existed 100%. If we can’t be sure he existed then we are not sure or we cannot know. If we cannot know we cannot say he may have existed at a 30% probability. That would make no sense if he existed. If the historian does not know for sure then the historian does not know. The historian may say it is likely or not likely he existed, but that still leaves the question unanswered. Those are the fundamental options with respect to any historical event — it either happened or it didn’t or we have no evidence or at best ambiguous evidence for it happening.

Thomas Bayes (Wikimedia)

Don’t get me wrong. I like Bayes’ theorem. It is a brilliant tool at doing what it was designed to do. But historical research is not a science and few historians, maybe a few die-hard stubborn empiricist historians, would claim it is a science that can predict what will be found in the sources or even sometimes what will happen in the future. Historical events are unique. The justified historical approach to the question of Jesus is to study the Jesus bequeathed to us in the surviving sources. Whether a historical figure behind the myth and theology historically existed is an unknown and unknowable question, and, I think, ultimately irrelevant.


Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix, 2014.

Doherty, Earl. The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999.

Rank, Otto, Raglan, and Alan Dundes. In Quest of the Hero. Mythos. Princeton University Press, 1990.



2024-11-24

Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 3: Prediction and History

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Earlier posts in this series:

  1. Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 1: Historical Facts and Probability
  2. Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History

—o0o—

For Richard Carrier the methods of scientific and historical research overlap and are different from each other only in degree:

Science and history are thus inseparable. But the logic of their respective methods is also the same. The fact that historical theories rest on far weaker evidence relative to scientific theories, and as a result achieve far lower degrees of certainty, is a difference only in degree, not in kind. Historical theories otherwise operate the same way as scientific theories, inferring predictions from empirical evidence—both actual predictions as well as hypothetical. (Proving History, 48)

Here I believe Carrier is mistaken about both the historian’s and the scientist’s methods. If there is any consolation it may be found in learning that the nineteenth philosopher John Stuart Mill made the same mistake in his attempt to describe scientific method and Mill was followed in the social sciences for many decades.

What Is a Scientific Theory?

ChatGPT image

Scientific theories do not arise naturally from observing empirical evidence:

Timing the fall of a variety of objects such as leaves, paper, cannon balls, rocks, boards, and automobiles running off cliffs has little (if any) utility for the development of a useful theory of falling bodies. One could run correlations between the weight of such objects and their time of fall for many lifetimes without ever accumulating the sort of knowledge conducive to theoretical thinking about falling bodies. (Systematic Empiricism, 29f)

Albert Einstein himself wrote:

. . . theory cannot be fabricated out of the results of observation . . . (Systematic Empiricism, 103)

In these posts I am presenting my view of “what history is” and “how history is done” that is at odds with Carrier’s empiricism. I reject the notion that the most historians can say about any past event is that it “probably” happened. Carrier makes his position clear early in Proving History:

If anyone rejects my axioms, then no further dialogue is possible on this issue until there is agreement on the broader logical and philosophical issues they represent. Producing such agreement is not the point of this book, which is only written for those who already accept these axioms (or who at least agree they should). . . .

Axiom 4: Every claim has a nonzero probability of being true or false (unless its being true or false is logically impossible). . . .

All claims have a nonzero epistemic probability of being true, no matter how absurd they may be (unless they’re logically impossible or unintelligible), because we can always be wrong about anything. . . .

Therefore, because we only have finite knowledge and are not infallible, apart from obviously undeniable things, some probability always remains that we are mistaken or misinformed or misled. . . . And although the probability that a given claim is true (or false) may be vanishingly small and thus practically zero, it is never actually zero. It’s vital to admit this.

(pp 20, 23, 24, 25 – my bolding apart from “Axiom 4”) 

I do reject this axiom. Even though I am not omniscient or infallible, it does not follow that there might be even the slightest chance that I am wrong to believe many historical events did indeed happen: the English, American, French, Russian revolutions, for example, or the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic War, World War I, or in the past reality of figures like Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell, Martin Luther, or Julius Caesar. That many Jews, communists, Roma and disabled were murdered under Hitler’s regime in an event known as the Holocaust is as undeniable as the fact that you are reading these words right now. Probability does not enter the historicity of these events at all. Probability enters only with respect to justifying interpretations, reasons, results or the scale of such events. They happened and our knowledge that they happened or existed is absolutely certain. We don’t need to know everything about them to have absolute confidence; the possibility that we are mistaken in our assurance that these things happened or that these persons existed really is zero.

So my intention is to place my contrary perspective on history — one that I think is accepted by the majority of professional historians — for consideration as another point of view from Carrier’s.

So what is a scientific theory, then, and how does it come about?

Scientific theory is concerned with concepts, terms not defined by reference to observation, which consequently enter into exact theoretical relations with one another which are often expressed math­ematically. . . . The purpose of theory in science is to explain, predict, and guide new research. But empiricist social theorizing consists of nothing more than generalizing, a process which summarizes what has been observed. A summary of past observations, however, cannot explain and predict, and accuracy cannot be gained from vagueness. . . .

The creation of a useful theory requires the abstraction of a pure structural model from the diverse material of observation. In other words, abstraction does not proceed by sum­marizing observations, but by generating a nonobservational struc­ture which deliberately does not summarize. The abstractive proc­ess, because it links theory to observation, is never complete with­out both. Theory, on the other hand, can be applied only through abstraction.

A theory is a constructed relational statement consisting of non­observable concepts connected to other nonobservable concepts. Concepts are defined not in terms of observations but by their re­lationship to each other. Although it may be meaningful to state “There is a cow,” the statement “There is a force” is senseless be­cause force is not an observable. Conversely, the statement “Force is equal to mass times acceleration” is meaningful because nonob­servable concepts can be related through mathematical connectives; but the statement “Cow equals four legs” is meaningless because observational terms cannot be so related. In other words, the truth of scientific theories is not an empirical truth based on observation; it is a consequence of form, the relationship of nonobservables. (Systematic Empiricism, 3, 24 – my bolding in all quotations)

No historian, nor indeed any social scientist, has ever produced a theory of the scientific kind to explain and predict social and historical events. Scientific theories and research have . . .

. . . resulted in explanation and prediction of phenomena . . .

but they have done so

through the rational cumulation of laws. (Systematic Empiricism, 6)

Theories and laws provide the framework through which the physical world is understood by the scientist.

What Carrier is doing is describing the data available to historians and drawing generalizations from subsets of it. Finding more data that is consistent with other known data does not involve making a prediction. It is simply describing the information we acquire from the data.

Can Historians Make Predictions?

Carrier argues that historians, like scientists, can make predictions on the basis of their “theories”:

And just as a geologist can make valid predictions about the future of the Mississippi River, so a historian can make valid (but still general) predictions about the future course of history, if the same relevant conditions are repeated (such prediction will be statistical, of course, and thus more akin to prediction in the sciences of meteorology and seismology, but such inexact predictions are still much better than random guessing). Hence, historical explanations of evidence and events are directly equivalent to scientific theories, and as such are testable against the evidence, precisely because they make predictions about that evidence.

In truth, science is actually subordinate to history, as it relies on historical documents and testimony for most of its conclusions (especially historical records of past experiments, observations, and data). Yet, at the same time, history relies on scientific findings to interpret historical evidence and events. Science and history are thus inseparable. But the logic of their respective methods is also the same. The fact that historical theories rest on far weaker evidence relative to scientific theories, and as a result achieve far lower degrees of certainty, is a difference only in degree, not in kind. Historical theories otherwise operate the same way as scientific theories, inferring predictions from empirical evidence—both actual predictions as well as hypothetical. Because actual predictions (such as that the content of Julius Caesar’s Civil War represents Caesar’s own personal efforts at political propaganda) and hypothetical predictions (such as that if we discover in the future any lost writings from the age of Julius Caesar, they will confirm or corroborate our predictions about how the content of the Civil War came about) both follow from historical theories. This is disguised by the fact that these are more commonly called ‘explanations.’ But theories are what they are. (Proving History, 47f)

What Carrier refers to as a prediction by a historian is really nothing more than a description of the relevant data found in the sources. A hypothesis formulated from the data can hardly claim to predict what is in the dataset. Rather, the hypothesis is tested for consistency with the data, but that’s not a prediction. In On the Historicity of Jesus Carrier regularly refers to what he finds in the sources as being “expected” by his hypothesis that Jesus was a mythical creation and not a historical person. I suggest, however, that the very notion of a “mythical” Jesus has arisen from a raft of studies on the question ever since the late eighteenth century and has been shaped by those studies and their interpretations of the New Testament. Carrier says, for example, on page 581 of On the Historicity that the idea that Jesus came from the seed of David — as per Romans 1:3 — could have been predicted by his hypothesis of mythicism:

So Paul’s reference to Jesus being ‘made’ (genomenos) of the ‘seed’ (sperma) of David and being ‘made’ (genomenos) from a woman are essen­tially expected on minimal mythicism . . . .

Instead, if we start with minimal mythicism, we can easily predict the original kernel to most likely have been that Jesus was indeed made from a celestial sperm that God snatched from David, by which God could fulfill his promise to David against the appearance of history having broken it. That this fits what we read in Paul therefore leaves us with no evidence that Paul definitely meant anything else. . . .

Minimal mythicism practically entails that the celestial Christ would be understood to have been formed from the ‘sperm of David’, even literally (God having saved some for the purpose, then using it as the seed from which he formed Jesus’ body of flesh, just as he had done Adam’s). I do not deem this to be absolutely certain. Yet I could have deduced it even without knowing any Christian literature, simply by combining minimal mythicism with a reading of the scriptures and the established background facts of previous history. And that I could do that entails it has a very high prob­ability on minimal mythicism. It is very much expected. (On the Historicity, 581f)

In Proving History Carrier speaks of the historian’s hypothesis being able to predict “what type of evidence to expect” — that is, the evidence that his hypothesis “predicts”:

. . . the evidence we have is exactly what we should expect if the story was made up . . .

Specifying the ‘type’ of evidence to expect in this way allows wide ranges of possible outcomes . . . .

One must thus distinguish ‘predictions of exact details’ (which BT does not concern itself with in this case) from ‘predictions regarding the type of evidence to expect.’ . . . 

. . . the evidence can fit our hypothesis fine, being entirely what we should expect . . . 

It’s sufficient to construct h to make . . . generic predictions (predictions of what type of evidence to expect) (On the Historicity, 58, 77, 78, 167, 214)

Leaving aside the tautology (expectation is a kind of prediction, isn’t it? — Carrier means “predictions of what type of evidence we will find”) I suggest that the only reason Carrier could “predict” finding a text saying Jesus came from the seed of David is because he knew it was in the database to begin with and that he could not formulate a hypothesis about a nonhistorical Jesus that contradicted it. Indeed, his starting hypothesis had to allow room for what he knew to be in the database. Romans 1:3 had been widely discussed and debated among both Jesus mythicists and Jesus historicists by generations of scholars. That there is no real prediction involved can be assessed by a Bayesian analysis itself. We have historical records testifying to Judeans entertaining a wide range of notions about the messiah or similar figure to come and relatively few seemed to have made the same “prediction” Carrier speaks of:

  • Some used Scriptures to argue he would come from Joseph, not David.
  • Some used the same Scriptures to determine there would be two messiahs.
  • Some said that no-one would know his genealogy.
  • Some said he would be hidden and no-one would know where he was.
  • The canonical gospels even indicate some debate among early Christians over whether he really was descended from David or not.
  • And on top of all of that a few scholars have offered reasons to think that the relevant passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans about Jesus and the seed of David was a late interpolation — that is, that Paul did not write it anyway!
If John the Baptist could be said to have fulfilled the prophecy that Elijah was to appear again beforehand by “coming in the spirit and power of Elijah”, why could not someone say something similar of the messiah, that he would come in the “spirit and power of David”? Some scholar have said there were Judeans who did hold such a view of the future Messiah.

So the sources themselves tell us that there were many notions about a future messianic figure and only a few of them linked that figure to David, so by relying on our “background knowledge” of messianic predictions we would have to say that a Bayesian assessment of the hypothesis that Paul’s claim could have been genuinely “predicted” is that it is unlikely.

As if to underscore the pointlessness of Carrier’s “prediction” that Paul’s passage was of a kind of evidence that was foreseen by Carrier’s hypothesis, he concedes that the same passage could be predicted with twice the probability of being found by the opposing hypothesis (p. 581). Of course, Carrier also argues that the cumulation of evidence and attendant probabilities outweighs mathematically the success rate of all the other “predictions” of the Jesus historicists.

Nothing is predicted or explained if the event itself is more certain than the law supposedly explaining it. The event is a test of the statement, not a prediction from it. (Systematic Empiricism, 130)

I covered other aspects of this question of prediction in historical research in the previous two posts.

Experimental Testing

Carrier further equates history with science by pointing out that both fields do sometimes perform experiments to test theories.

Historical methods are identical to scientific methods in this respect, being just another set of iterations of [the Hypothetico-Deductive Method]. In fact, many sciences are historical, for example, geology, cosmology, paleontology, criminal forensics, all of which explore not merely scientific generalizations but historical particulars, such as when the Big Bang occurred, or how the solar system formed, or exactly when or where a large asteroid struck the earth, or when a volcano erupted and what resulted from it, or what happened to a specific species in a specific historical period, or who committed what crime when. Not even the claim that historians must deal with human thoughts and intentions makes a difference, as these are as much a necessary occupation of psychologists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists. It’s also fundamental to the scientific study of game theory and all of cognitive science. Nor is there any demarcation based on the role of controlled experiments. Much of science does not rely on experiments but primarily involves field observations (e.g., astronomy, zoology, ecology, paleontology), an approach to evidence directly analogous to the historian (most clearly parallel in the science of archaeology, but “field observations” of the artifacts we call “texts” and “documents” is just as analogous). Conversely, experiments sometimes do have a place in historical methodology. 10

10 For some examples, see my essay on “Experimental History,” July 28, 2007, at http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/07/experimental-history.html     (Proving History, 105, 308

The examples on the linked page contain a discussion of what a certain type of ancient Greek ship actually looked like and how it might have functioned. Not only historians are often fascinated by what techniques ancients might have employed for all sorts of things. But those kinds of experiments are not the kind that relate to the kinds of events that interest most historians. We cannot replicate and experiment conditions of human behaviour to test this or that explanation for, say, a war. To refer back to J. and D. Willer,

Empiricist induction is based on likeness, but lab experiments are by definition unlike natural cases and thus any inductions from them for application in social circumstances are illegitimate. . . . Only the field experiment is logically capable of generating results satisfying the systematic empiricists’ criteria and then only if the empirical power of the researcher is strong enough to effectively (or absolutely) control the empirical circumstances. But until sociologists become philosopher kings or are delegated total power over the environment of their experiments by a totalitarian government, the field experiment is as useless as the others. (Systematic Empiricism, 135f)

Does the Hypothetico-Deductive Method Make Prediction Possible?

As for the value of the hypothetico-deductive method for making predictions,

. . . “Pure logic” cannot draw necessary conclusions by deduction from inductive general statements. The only general statements which can lead to true necessary conclusions in pure logic are those which are “true” by definition, and these are nonpredictive. If it is true by definition that all swans are white we simply do not admit the existence of black swans but call those birds which look like swans but are black by some other name (“snaws”). We cannot predict that if we find a swan he will be white but we will call “swans” only birds which we observe to be white. (Systematic Empiricism, 126)

Consequently . . .

Consequently no empirical generalization can act as a major premise in a deductive explanation, and empirical generalizations can never be used deductively to explain or predict. . . .

Scientific explanation cannot be deductive because scientific laws are statements relating nonobservable concepts, such as force, mass, and acceleration in terms of nonobservable connectives such as an equivalence or an equals sign. (Systematic Empiricism, 130f)

In 1942 the Journal of Philosophy published a paper arguing, like Carrier seventy years later, that historical methods were scientific. The Willers in response write, in part,

It comes as no surprise that Hempel cites no general laws in that paper and shows no application to history; but at the same time he refers to a “metaphysical theory of history,” apparently intending this label to apply to Karl Marx. From an empiricist view of science Marx may very well have presented a “metaphysical theory,” but from the viewpoint of scientific knowledge systems this intended negative criticism is actually a compliment to Marx, who (unlike those who search for empirical “patterns” in history) based his view of history on theoretic relations of concepts. (Systematic Empiricism, 129)

History, a Very Bad Predictor of Future Events

So convinced is Carrier of his status of history as a scientific process that he believes history can be used to predict not only what evidence will be found but even the future itself. This is empiricism with a vengeance.

And just as a geologist can make valid predictions about the future of the Mississippi River, so a historian can make valid (but still general) predictions about the future course of history, if the same relevant conditions are repeated (such prediction will be statistical, of course, and thus more akin to prediction in the sciences of meteorology and seismology, but such inexact predictions are still much better than random guessing). Hence, historical explanations of evidence and events are directly equivalent to scientific theories, and as such are testable against the evidence, precisely because they make predictions about that evidence. (Proving History, 47)

No, they cannot. The reason is that the same conditions are never repeated in human affairs. We can have fears, hopes and plans for the future, but we can never predict it — except in hindsight! In hindsight what happens seems to have been inevitable. But only in hindsight.

While many people, especially politicians, try to learn lessons from history, history itself shows that very few of these lessons have been the right ones in retrospect. Time and again, history has proved a very bad predictor of future events. This is because history never repeats itself; nothing in human society, the main concern of the historian, ever happens twice under exactly the same conditions or in exactly the same way. And when people try to use history, they often do so not in order to accommodate themselves to the inevitable, but in order to avoid it. (In Defence of History, 50)

As for history being on a par with science in its methods, and keeping in mind Carrier’s frequent appeals to geologists being able to predict the future, Evans concludes:

History, in the end, may for the most part be seen as a science in the weak sense of the German term Wissenschaft, an organized body of knowledge acquired through research carried out according to gen­erally agreed methods, presented in published reports, and subject to peer review. It is not a science in the strong sense that it can frame general laws or predict the future. But there are sciences, such as geology, which cannot predict the future either. (In Defence of History, 62)

In the next and final post in this series I will tie the points raised directly to the question of the historicity of Jesus and Carrier’s approach in particular.


Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix, 2014.

Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. Norton, 1997.

Hempel, Carl G. “The Function of General Laws in History.” The Journal of Philosophy 39, no. 2 (January 15, 1942): 35. https://doi.org/10.2307/2017635.

Willer, David, and Judith Willer. Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience. Prentice-Hall, 1973. https://archive.org/details/systematicempiri0000will



2024-11-18

Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 2: Certainty and Uncertainty in History

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

In the previous post I spoke of the historian’s absolute confidence — of their certainty, of no room for doubt — in the basic events of the past. I don’t know how anyone can seriously think there might be even the slightest room for doubt that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and overran Singapore shortly afterwards, for example. But historians are not interested in simply documenting past events. That’s not chiefly what they do. Not most of the time. Or certainly not all that they do.

There are many ways to write history but I will be speaking about the approach well known to us all — the narrative or story approach to describing past events.

It is not the facticity of the events that is in question

It is at this narrative level where problems and disagreements, doubts and uncertainties, among historians arise.

Source: Wikipedia

Consider the difference in the following statements about event of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor:

  1. In a “Day of Infamy” Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, dragging the U.S. into war.
  2. The US suddenly cut off nearly all of Japan’s oil supply, thus compelling Japan to take the oil fields in Borneo; but first it needed to make a preventive strike on the fleet at Pearl Harbor.

In both statements the raw events are the same. There is no dispute about any of the specific events mentioned. The “facts” themselves are certain. No probability analysis is required to determine how “probably true” any of the details are. But we have two very different stories, two very different histories, all because of the way the events have been selected from the masses of other details that could have been added to both stories, and because of the way those selected events are woven together and the innuendo in which they are embedded.

That’s where the debates of historians centre. That’s where historians, for all the pains they endure sifting through the masses of data, selecting particular items they think to be most relevant, and trying to weave them into a story that they hope will be worthwhile for others to read — that’s where the real historical work happens. It is not about assessing the probabilities that this or that event actually happened. The groundwork of getting the clearly established “facts” or events is a given. (I am speaking generally, not about those special occasions where new documents are discovered and in need of verification or where some isolated point is in dispute.)

Witness the History Wars

The book that opened Australia’s History Wars

Last time I referred to History Wars. When one side launches a salvo about, say, the good intentions of most of the pioneers and cites specific incidents to argue that very few indigenous people were mistreated directly or deliberately by white settlers, the historians on the other side might grant some of those points but pull out more newspaper stories and police records and archival material to supply the factual evidence that they expect to win the other side of the debate. The debates are about the meaning and interpretations of those recorded events. They may supply evidence to demonstrate that some of the details are exaggerated or down-played. But very rarely, as far as I am aware, do historians spend time trying to assess the probability that X or Y happened in the first place.

Undeniability of certain events

Richard Carrier does acknowledge that some of our knowledge is undeniable and not subject to any shadow of room for any doubt:

The only exception would be immediate experiences that at their most basic level are undeniable (e.g., that you see words in front of you at this very moment, or that “Caesar was immortal and Brutus killed him” is logically impossible). . . . Therefore, because we only have finite knowledge and are not infallible, apart from obviously undeniable things, some probability always remains that we are mistaken or misinformed or misled.

and

. . . . apart from the undeniables of immediate experience, all facts are theoretical . . .

Of course “historical facts” do include direct uninterpreted experience . . . .

(Carrier 25, 298, 302. My comment: Few historians would say that even direct experience is ever “uninterpreted” or that all knowledge that does not come to us from direct experience is necessarily “theoretical”.)

The war memorials, the war cemeteries, the plaques with honour rolls of the dead in countless school and club halls around the nation, the photographs, the memorabilia passed down through generations, — all of these and more tell us that the twentieth century world wars were not at any level (not even at an infinitesimally low level) “theoretical”. Those wars are not known by “immediate experience” to most people today. But those wars are “facts of history” that are undeniable. (Again, I am speaking generally. Of course we may discuss historical events as theoretical events for other reasons and in other contexts, but I am addressing more fundamental bread and butter issues here.)

When we examine why those wars are undeniable, we find certain kinds of evidence that gives us certainty. The same applies to other events in other times. The difference will be that the further back we travel, generally speaking, the more scarce various types of evidence become. But historians still look for the same kinds of evidence about the remote past as they find for more recent events. Naturally questions of authenticity arise for different types of sources. But that even applies in modern times. One famous historian who specialized in the study of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was initially deceived by the discovery of the Hitler Diaries that turned out to be forgeries. Historians are well aware of the possibility of fraud and the difference between fact and fiction when examining different kinds of evidence. But that doesn’t reduce all their knowledge of “what events happened” to a “theoretical” status along with some sense that they think they could be “possibly, even if only very very slightly, mistaken”).

So when Richard Carrier writes . . .

Most of what we can say, especially about ancient history, is “maybe” or “probably”—not “definitely.” There is obviously more than one degree of certainty. Some things we are more sure of than others, and some things we are only barely sure of at all. Hence, especially in history, and even more so in ancient history, confidence must often be measured in relative degrees of certainty, and not in black-and-white terms of only “true” and “false.”

(Carrier 23)

. . . I might be wrong, but I suspect that not even Richard Carrier entertains for a moment even the slightest theoretical possibility that there was no Roman empire in existence two thousand years ago.

Not even postmodernists view historical events as “theoretically probable”

One might expect theoretical doubts about “facts” of specific events in the past among postmodernist historians. But no, not even postmodernist historians go as far as Carrier does in the above quotations. In the words of a Professor of Religious and Cultural History at the University of Dundee, Callum Brown,

Any postmodernist historian is not being a postmodernist all of the time. Like every historian, the postmodernist must conduct empirical research, establishing that events occurred and the order of them, checking sources that verify the facts of the case, and making decisions of judgement (balance of probabilities may be the best term) where absolute certainty is not possible. . . .

Historians are probably the least likely academics to preface their books with theoretical explanation.

(Brown, 10f. My comment: note the role of probability applies to exceptional cases.)

Here is how Brown presents “a good historian”:

To be a good historian, it is thought you have to be good in empiricist method, and be seen to have a full grasp of facts. This involves the application of scholarship skills to a series of questions. These occur on different levels. On the upper level are the big questions of: What happened, when did it happen, and why did it happen? At the second level of scholarship, the historian answers these questions by asking: What is the existing state of historical knowledge? And what hypotheses best fit the known facts? At the third level, the historian tests the existing state of knowledge by locating new documents and other sources, or re -evaluating already known ones, checking their date and place of origin, their authorship, their destiny and circulation, and how these discoveries alter the existing state of understanding. Next and last, the historian writes a report or a narrative of the issue, replete with edited evidence and how to interpret it, properly sourced with footnotes, and publishes this in book or article form to be checked by peer review by other historians. If after being read by other historians the published account alters in some degree the existing state of knowledge, it acquires a degree of acceptance that other scholars then come along to challenge and re-assess, in turn to repeat the process of investigation in an endless cycle of moving knowledge forward.

This method of doing History is broadly what all academic and professional historians aspire to the world over.

(Brown 21f)

A time to be certain, a time to doubt

There is a difference between establishing facts beyond doubt on the one hand and interpreting those facts and weaving them into a bigger narrative on the other. So there is a place for doubt and debate among historians but it is rarely over whether or not a particular event at some level actually happened. Again, keeping with  postmodernists (persons many would assume to “doubt everything, even facts”), we see that even they hew to “getting the basic facts right”, leaving no room for doubt in that area:

The postmodernist critic distinguishes three different aspects of empiri­cism. These are empiricism as an event, empiricism as a method, and empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. To each of these, the postmod­ernist has different attitudes.

Empiricism as an event is the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an event in the History of ideas within which empiricist method and empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge originated. . . .

Empiricism as a method is the second aspect distinguished by the post­ modernist. This is the method by which empiricism defines knowledge. Empiricism argues that knowledge is acquired through an apparatus of human observation, experience, testing of authenticity, verification, cor­roboration and presentation for judgement (or peer review) by others in a value-free form. Even if the consequences of empiricism are challenged, postmodernists most certainly do not reject empiricist methods. Like all historians, the postmodernist needs empiricist method for the essential skills, and any student of History must learn and deploy them.

The postmodernist distinguishes a third aspect of empiricism, however – empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. And this is seen as being full of problems. In the work of many academics across science and non­ science disciplines, there is an implicit notion that empiricism constitutes all that is necessary to knowledge – that it is a complete system of knowl­edge with no other connections. This notion is that human knowledge acquisition is nothing more than empiricism, and needs nothing more than this for the advancement of each discipline. In the case of History, the writing of the past has been seen by some empiricists as being satisfactorily embraced by empiricist method.

(Brown 21-25)

Historians who go beyond “getting the facts right beyond doubt” and view all their historical work as “getting even the narratives right” are not in fashion today:

One such empiricist historian was Geoffrey Elton, a leading right-wing historian, who regarded empiricism as the only worthwhile basis of pro­fessional training in the History discipline. . . . His purist empiricist position brought him to dispute with other historians over decades – including non-postmodernists.

(Brown 25)

Callum Brown discusses the difference between undoubted (we can say “undoubtable”) events and the way historians put them together to tell a story. What we are calling an “historical event” (I prefer the term “event” to “fact”) in this post (e.g. the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) is “something that happened . . . the event occurred . . .” Where historians differ is how they put those events together to each tell their own distinctive account.

Once an event of the past is described, it becomes something else — it becomes a narrative. . . . There is never any neutrality in a story.

(Brown 28f)

Brown concludes his discussion by leaving the reader in no doubt about the absolute certainty of the past events investigated by the historian:

Empiricism is the basic method in all scholarship. It bears endless repeti­tion that the empiricist skills of verification, close textual attention, proper and rational sourcing, referencing and so on, remain absolutely central to all that historical scholarship does, whether postmodernist or not. In this regard, the Enlightenment created the method of the modern historian.

But empirical method is one thing. The other is the empiricist philosophy of knowledge, or modernism, and that most certainly is challenged . Empiricism gives the illusion of delivering fact, truth and reality, by slipping from the event to a human narrative that describes the event.

(Brown 30)

But does not certainty breed arrogance?

But doesn’t certainty breed arrogance? Is not there an admirable and necessary humility in doubt? Yes, but no one can be arrogant by claiming to know the world is round. The kind of certainty that engenders arrogance is the certainty of opinion and moral perspective — of conviction of holding “The Truth”. Brown calls upon the words of Friedrich Nietzsche to make the point that doubt belongs in the way we tell stories, in the ways we interpret and understand the events of the past. It is not about the two world wars of the twentieth century or the ancient Roman empire to some theoretical status of which we can only be 99.99% certain.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins. (Nietzsche, 1873)

Certainty emerges as a linguistic construction which, Nietzsche went on, ‘prompts a moral impulse’ to doubt the denier of certainty, to see in doubt the very basis of immorality. This is a massive irony. Nietzsche says doubt itself becomes superior to fact and moral certainty. This seems like craziness. It seems to be completely absurd and inverted in logic. It over­ turns everything we are trained to believe as students at school and in college. It may be difficult to grasp that doubt is superior to certainty. This is why postmodernism is truly revolutionary as a philosophical system of thought.

(Brown 30f)

Was the gingerbread vendor really kicked to death?

There are occasions, however, when historians do actually disagree over the factual status of an asserted event of the past. The historian Edward Carr once argued that a past event known to have happened only becomes a “historical event” when it is used by historians in their narratives.

Gingerbread vendor (Source: Victorian Picture Gallery)

At Stalybridge Wakes in 1850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the result of some petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry mob. Is this a fact of history? A year ago I should unhesitatingly have said ‘no’. It was recorded by an eye-witness in some little known memoirs; but I had never seen it judged worthy of mention by any historian. A year ago Dr Kitson Clark cited it in his Ford lectures in Oxford. Does this make it into a historical fact? Not, I think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is that it has been proposed for membership of the select club of historical facts. It now awaits a seconder and sponsors. It may be that in the course of the next few years we shall see this fact appearing first in footnotes, then in the text, of articles and books about nineteenth-century England, and that in twenty or thirty years’ time it may be a well-established historical fact. Alternatively, nobody may take it up, in which case it will relapse into the limbo of unhistorical facts about the past from which Dr Kitson Clark has gallantly attempted to rescue it. What will decide which of these two things will happen? It will depend, I think, on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which Dr Kitson Clark cited this incident is accepted by other historians as valid and significant. Its status as a historical fact will turn on a question of interpretation. This element of interpretation enters into every fact of history.

(Carr 12)

Notice that Carr understood the event to have been factual because it was found in an eye-witness’s memoirs. He was discussing what he understood to be a real event, not a theoretical one. But another historian checked the source and raised doubts:

The likelihood of the gingerbread salesman’s unfortunate death being a historical fact in this sense is moderately but not over­whelmingly high because the reference Kitson Clark used for it was not a contemporary one, but a set of memoirs written long after the event, and memoirs are sometimes unreliable even where they are giving eyewitness accounts of happenings in the past. If I had been Kitson Clark, I should have looked for a contemporary document to verify my claim. It is for this reason, I think, not because it has not been widely quoted elsewhere (except in discussions of Carr’s What Is History?) that the status as a historical fact of the gingerbread sales­ man’s murder in 1850 must be regarded as still provisional, to say the least.

(Evans 66f)

Richard Evans is far from being a postmodernist historian. Note the kind of source he prefers to use to help establish the historicity of a person or event. It is a contemporary one. Not even a late memoir of recording personal reminiscences is considered as secure as a contemporary reference to the event. Let those who rely upon Josephus as a slam-dunk verification of the existence of Jesus take note of how historical research is undertaken in “non-biblical departments”.

Where probability lurks in history

Notice also that Evans did acknowledge a role probability (and its attendant humility) in historical studies:

No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writ­ing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence.

But that sentence should not be ripped from its context. Evans was specifically addressing the narratives historians write, the way they interpret the established events. Here is the context:

In similar vein to David Harlan, Ellen Somekawa and Elizabeth Smith argue that because “within whatever rules historians can artic­ulate, all interpretations are equally valid,” it is necessary for historians to “shift the grounds for the assessment of integrity from the absolute or objective truth to the moral or political. That is,” they continue, “rather than believe in the absolute truth of what we are writing, we must believe in the moral or political position we are taking with it.” They add that they “reject the assumption that if we abandon our claim to objective truth we must be writing in bad faith (writing propaganda in the most pejorative sense of the word),” but they offer no reason to suppose why this should not be the case. In fact, of course, in classic postmodernist fashion they are caricaturing the position they are attacking by pushing it out to an extreme. No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writ­ing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence. In the end it simply isn’t true that two historical arguments which contradict each other are equally valid, that there is no means of deciding between them as history because they are necessarily based on different polit­ical and historical philosophies.

(Evans 188f)

Evans is disagreeing with claims that interpretations or understandings of historical events are all equally valid and the accusation that historians necessarily believe that those interpretations are “absolute truth”. Note further that Evans began his book with the following quotation, even comparing the fact-finding methods of historians to the work of astronomers, a comparison used by Carrier though with a quite different perspective (Proving History, p. 105). In what follows I cannot detect any sense that the “raw events” of the past are to be understood as theoretical knowledge with a minimum of some room for doubt about their historicity. Quite the opposite, in fact.

However much they might have agreed on the need for accuracy and truthfulness, historians down the ages have held widely differing views on the purposes to which these things were to be put and the way in which the facts they presented were to be explained. . . .

Ranke, Leopold von

. . . Ranke introduced into the study of modern history the methods that had recently been devel­oped by philologists in the study of ancient and medieval literature to determine whether a text, say, of a Shakespeare play or of a medieval legend like the Nibelungenlied was true or corrupted by later interpo­lations, whether it was written by the author it was supposed to have been written by, and which of the available versions was the most reli­able. Historians, argued Ranke, had to root out forgeries and falsifica­tions from the record.They had to test documents on the basis of their internal consistency and their consistency with other documents originating at the same period. They had to stick to “primary sources,” eyewitness reports and what Ranke called the “purest, most immediate documents” which could be shown to have originated at the time under investigation, and avoid reliance on “secondary sources,” such as memoirs or later histories generated after the event. . . .

Ranke’s principles still form the basis for much historical research and teaching today. . . .

Whatever the means they use, historians still have to engage in the basic Rankean spadework of investigating the provenance of documents, of inquiring about the motives of those who wrote them, the circumstances in which they were written, and the ways in which they relate to other documents on the same subject. The perils which await them should they fail to do this are only too obvious. All these things have belonged to the basic training of historians since the nineteenth century, and rightly so. . . .

Skeptics who point to the fact that all sources are “biased” and conclude from this that historians are bound to be misled by them are as wide of the mark as politicians who imagine that future histo­rians will take their memoirs on trust. Nor is there anything unusu­al in the fact that a modern discipline places such heavy reliance on principles developed more than a century and a half before: Chemistry, for example, still uses the periodic table of elements, while medical research continues to employ the mid-nineteenth­ century device of “Koch’s postulates” to prove that a microorganism is the carrier of a particular disease. These analogies with scientific method point up the fact that when source criticism was introduced into historical study, it, too, was regarded as a “scientific” technique. Its use legitimated history as an independent profession. . . . 

The understanding of science which these claims implied was basically inductive. Out there, in the documents, lay the facts, waiting to be discovered by historians, just as the stars shone out there in the heav­ens, waiting to be discovered by astronomers; all historians had to do was apply the proper scientific method, eliminate their own person­ality from the investigation, and the facts would come to light. The object of research was thus to “fill in the gaps” in knowledge—a rationale that is still given as the basis for the vast majority of Ph.D. theses in history today.

(Evans 13-17)

Evans goes on to point out that even the pioneer of modern history himself, Leopold von Ranke, failed to produce a genuinely “objective history” despite his claims to be attempting to do so. Ranke failed to understand the subjectivity that enters when we seek to understand and use data in a narrative. For that reason his approach to historical knowledge (not his methods), known as historical positivism, has long since been discarded by most historians today. But as Evans reminds us, the spadework required to establish facts as certain remains with historians today. (Here we are entering another misconception I very often find among biblical historians: they all too frequently tend to equate discarded positivism with the methods of positivism!)

History is not the same as science

Contrast Carrier’s comparison of historical research with the historical method:

Geology and paleontology, for instance, are largely occupied with determining the past history of life on earth and of the earth itself, just as cosmology is mainly concerned with the past history of the universe as a whole. . . . 

For example, we can document our testimony to seeing highly compressed rock on a mountaintop with extinct seashells embedded within it. But this information is only useful to us if we can infer from such observations (and others like it) that that rock used to be under the sea and thus has moved from where it once was, and that this rock has been under vast pressures over a great duration after those shells were deposited in it. . . . A particular pattern and sequence of layers in a rock formation can even confirm to us specific historical facts, such as exactly when a volcano erupted, a valley flooded, or a meteorite struck the earth thousands of miles away. . . . 

History is the same. The historian looks at all the evidence that exists now and asks what could have brought that evidence into existence.

(Carrier, 46f)

Marx and Toynbee — both believed that they had discovered “laws” governing historical events

I have to disagree with Carrier here. No, history is not the same. The geologist is interpreting the rocks through a knowledge of physical laws and seeing how those laws have acted out in the past to shape our earth today. History is not the same.

Historians study human actions and few historians would agree today that the persons or events they study follow predictable laws. There was once a time when a good number of historians hoped or believed they could find laws at work in historical processes but generally speaking those days are gone. The one example of historical processes following laws that most of us have at least heard about is Marxism: the view that historical events were all manifestations of class struggle. (Another “history follows laws” approach that I was introduced to at high school was Toynbee’s “challenge and response” model of historical events.)

The reason history cannot predict the future is because “it”, or human societies are all different, events are never repeated, they are never the same. They are not governed by the (theoretical) laws of science as is the physical matter of the cosmos. We can predict outcomes only at the most general level and at that level it tells us nothing more than we already know about human behaviour.

In principle the methods of the historian may be the same as the bulk of those of a scientist and for that reason history is sometimes called a science or scientific, but few historians are trying to understand theoretical laws to explain events.

Continuing in the next post…..


Brown, Callum G. Postmodernism for Historians. Routledge, 2005.

Carr, Edward Hallet. What Is History? Vintage, 1967.

Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. Norton, 1997.



2024-11-16

Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 1: Historical Facts and Probability

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

It’s been a long while since I wrote about Jesus mythicism. I hope what I write now will present a slightly different and useful perspective.

Should not Christian apologists be thrilled with Richard Carrier’s widely known conclusion and welcome it:

In my estimation the odds Jesus existed are less than 1 in 12,000. . . .

There is only about a 0% to 33% chance Jesus existed.

(On the Historicity of Jesus, 600, 607)

Doesn’t that indicate that Jesus was a truly exceptional figure according to the best conclusions of the atheist scholar? Don’t believing Christians want Jesus to be unique, to be different from anyone else, to bring about an unlikely event by normal human standards? A 1 in 12,000 figure is surely bringing Jesus down too close to normality, isn’t it? Shouldn’t Jesus be a unique figure in history? So if historical tools as understood and used by Richard Carrier conclude that Jesus is not to be expected in the annals of normal human history and left no record comparable to the records of other mortals for historians to ponder, should not apologists take comfort from such findings?

I want to address what appears to me to be a widespread misconception about historical knowledge across various social media platforms and in some published works where this question is discussed.

Too often I hear that historians can never be absolutely certain about anything in the past and that they always, of necessity, can only speak of “what probably happened”. (When I speak of historians I have in mind the main body of the historical guild in history departments around the world. I am not talking about biblical scholars and theologians because their methods are very often quite different.)

So let’s begin with Part 1 of the question of probability in historical research. Richard Carrier is widely known for reducing the entire question of Jesus’ existence to a matter of probabilities. I agree with much of Carrier’s approach but I also disagree on some major points. A fundamental point on which I disagree with Carrier is the claim that the most a historian can say about any historical event is that it is “probably” true. Carrier writes:

All claims have a nonzero epistemic probability of being true, no matter how absurd they may be (unless they’re logically impossible or unintelligible), because we can always be wrong about anything. And that entails there is always a nonzero probability that we are wrong, no matter how small that probability is. And therefore there is always a converse of that probability, which is the probability that we are right (or would be right) to believe that claim. This holds even for many claims that are supposedly certain, such as the conclusions of logical or mathematical proofs. For there is always a nonzero probability that there is an error in that proof that we missed. Even if a thousand experts check the proof, there is still a nonzero probability that they all missed the same error. The probability of this is vanishingly small, but still never zero. Likewise, there is always a nonzero probability that we ourselves are mistaken about what those thousand experts concluded. And so on. The only exception would be immediate experiences that at their most basic level are undeniable (e.g., that you see words in front of you at this very moment, or that “Caesar was immortal and Brutus killed him” is logically impossible). But no substantial claim about history can ever be that basic. History is in the past and thus never in our immediate experience. And knowing what logically could or couldn’t have happened is not even close to knowing what did. Therefore, all empirical claims about history, no matter how certain, have a nonzero probability of being false, and no matter how absurd, have a nonzero probability of being true.

(Proving History, 24f – my bolding in all quotations)

A little further on Carrier raises again the exception of a “trivial” event like an “uninterpreted [direct personal] experience”:

The only exceptions I noted are claims about our direct uninterpreted experience (which are not historical facts) and the logically necessary and the logically impossible (which are not empirical facts).17 Everything else has some epistemic probability of being true or false. 

17. Of course “historical facts” do include direct uninterpreted experience, because all observations of data and of logical and mathematical relations reduce to that, but no fact of history consists solely of that; and “the logically necessary and the logically impossible” are empirical facts in the trivial sense that they can be empirically observed, and empirical propositions depend on them, and logical facts are ultimately facts of the universe (in some fashion or other), but these are not empirical facts in the same sense as historical facts, because we cannot ascertain what happened in the past solely by ruminating on logical necessities or impossibilities. Logical facts are thus traditionally called analytical facts, in contrast to empirical facts. Some propositions might combine elements of both, but insofar as a proposition is at all empirical, it is not solely analytical (and thus has some nonzero epistemic probability of being true or false), and insofar as it is solely analytical, it is not relevantly empirical (and thus cannot affirm what happened in the past, but only what could or couldn’t have).

(Proving History, 62, 302)

And again, in pointing out that historians can never be absolutely certain about any “substantive claim”,

Such certainty for us is logically impossible (at least for all substantive claims about history . . . )

(Proving History, 329)

Not even God can avoid reducing all knowledge of the past to “what probably happened”:

A confidence level of 100% is mathematically and logically impossible, as we never have access to 100% of all information, i.e., we’re not omniscient, and as Gödel proved, no one can be, for it’s logically necessary that there will always be things we won’t know, even if we’re God . . . 

(Proving History, 331)

Publicly available on archive.org

I have to disagree. We don’t need “100% of all information” or to be “omniscient” in order to be absolutely certain about certain facts of the past. Historians are indeed certain about basic facts. We know for a fact that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor a few years before that event, that Europeans migrated to and settled in the Americas, Africa, Australasia in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, that King John signed the Magna Carter in 1215, that Rome once ruled the Mediterranean, that the Jerusalem temple was destroyed in 70 CE.

Historical events are unique and unrepeatable and our knowledge of many of them can often be absolutely certain. Witness the “History Wars” around the world — the Americas, India, Australia. In Australia, for instance, the arguments over the killing of aborigines and removing children from their families is not about what “probably” happened but what the evidence tells us did actually happen — with no room for any doubt at all. The 1992 Holocaust trial of David Irving was not about what probably happened but what can be known as an indisputable fact to have happened.

To be certain about such events does not require us to possess 100% of all the related information. Further, being certain about such events does not mean we are certain about all the details. There are grey areas where probability does enter the picture but the core events themselves cannot be legitimately doubted.

* The quoted phrases are from Hindess, Barry, and Paul Q. Hirst. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, page 2, in reference to Willer & Willer’s book, Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudo-Science.

A “brilliant and devastating critique”* of the probability approach to historical facts (in fact to the entire area of theoretical empiricism that once typically “characterised the academic social sciences and history”) was published in the 1972 book Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudo-Science by David and Judith Willer. The chapter that specifically addresses probability in this context was written by the sociologist Dr Cesar Hernandez-Cela. Here is what he says about probability in the context being discussed in this post:

A relative frequency is a probability only if the number of events taken into account is infinite. But when the number of instances is finite . . . the ratio is a relative frequency but not a probability. . . . . A relative frequency is a description, but a probability is a calculation. Although we may calculate a theoretical probability value of 1/2 for a universe in which A and B are equally represented when the number of instances approaches infinity, the most that can be said about the number of heads that will turn up when tossing a coin twenty times is that there will be a particular frequency which is unknown until we toss the coin. In other words, the assignment of a value of 1/2 simply because the coin has two sides is an error because we do not know that each side will be equally represented in any empirical case. Equal representation in probability is a mathematical assumption which is violated in finite empirical cases. . . . We may instead find that tossing a die results in a successive run of fives . . . .

The theory of probability . . . can be used in scientific theories, but it cannot be used to associate observables. Sociological statistical procedures are concerned with observables and therefore violate the conditions under which probability calculations may be legitimately used. But they are so often used that they are frequently accepted (in spite of their obvious absurdity) without question. We are told that the probability of rain tomorrow is 60 percent when, in fact, it will either rain or it will not. Such statements are unjustified, wrong, and misleading.

(Systematic Empiricism, 97f – italics in the original)

One is reminded here of Richard Carrier’s discussion of the “Rank-Raglan hero class”, a category of ancient figures — most of whom are mythical — who share certain mythical attributes.

This is a hero-type found repeated across at least fifteen known mythic heroes (including Jesus) — if we count only those who clearly meet more than half of the designated parallels (which means twelve or more matches out of twenty-two elements), which requirement eliminates many historical persons, such as Alexander the Great or Caesar Augustus, who accumulated many elements of this hero-type in the tales told of them, yet not that many.

The twenty-two features distinctive of this hero-type are:

1. The hero’s mother is a virgin.
2. His father is a king or the heir of a king.
3. The circumstances of his conception are unusual.
4. He is reputed to be the son of a god.
5. An attempt is made to kill him when he is a baby.
6. To escape which he is spirited away from those trying to kill him.
7. He is reared in a foreign country by one or more foster parents.
8. We are told nothing of his childhood.
9. On reaching manhood he returns to his future kingdom.
10. He is crowned, hailed or becomes king.
11. He reigns uneventfully (i.e., without wars or national catastrophes).
12. He prescribes laws.
13. He then loses favor with the gods or his subjects.
14. He is driven from the throne or city.
15. He meets with a mysterious death.
16. He dies atop a hill or high place.
17. His children, if any, do not succeed him.
18. His body turns up missing.
19. Yet he still has one or more holy sepulchers (in fact or fiction).
20. Before taking a throne or a wife, he battles and defeats a great adversary (such as a king, giant, dragon or wild beast).

and

21. His parents are related to each other.
22. He marries a queen or princess related to his predecessor.

Many of the heroes who fulfill this type also either (a) performed miracles (in life or as a deity after death) or were (b) preexistent beings who became incarnated as men or (c) subsequently worshiped as savior gods, any one of which honestly should be counted as a twenty-third attribute. . . . 

1. Oedipus (21)
2. Moses (20)
3. Jesus (20)
4. Theseus (19)
5. Dionysus (19)
6. Romulus (18)
7. Perseus (17)
8. Hercules (17)
9. Zeus (15)
10. Bellerophon (14)
11. Jason (14)
12. Osiris (14)
13. Pelops (13)
14. Asclepius (12)
15. Joseph [i.e., the son of Jacob] (12)

This is a useful discovery, because with so many matching persons it doesn’t matter what the probability is of scoring more than half on the Rank-Raglan scale by chance coincidence. Because even if it can happen often by chance coincidence, then the percentage of persons who score that high should match the ratio of real persons to mythical persons. In other words, if a real person can have the same elements associated with him, and in particular so many elements (and for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether they actually occurred), then there should be many real persons on the list—as surely there are far more real persons than mythical ones. . . . 

So there is no getting around the fact that if the ratio of conveniently named mythical godmen to conveniently named historical godmen is 2 to 1 or greater, then the prior probability that Jesus is historical is 33% or less.

(On the Historicity of Jesus, 229-231, 241 – italics original)

First, we have fewer than a quarter of 100 instances in our group so a per centum figure is misleading. The total number Raglan studied was twenty.

Second, on what basis can we validly decide to count only those figures who score more than half of the listed attributes? Carrier identifies ten of the twenty-two listed features as applicable to Alexander the Great and acknowledges (though disputes) the possibility of assigning him thirteen. Half seems to be an arbitrary cut-off point (or at least tendentious insofar as it excludes the exceptions, historical persons who would spoil the point being made) especially when we know that Raglan himself said that his list of twenty-two was an arbitrary number. Other scholars of mythical “types” produced different lists:

Von Hahn had sixteen incidents, Rank did not divide his pattern into incidents as such, and Raglan had twenty-two incidents. Raglan himself admitted that his choice of twenty-two incidents (as opposed to some other number of incidents) was arbitrary (Raglan 1956:186).

(In Quest of the Hero, 189. — Raglan’s words were: I have taken twenty-two, but it would be easy to take more. Would a more complete list reduce the other figures to matching fewer than half….? So we begin to see the arbitrariness of Carrier’s deciding to focus only on those with more than half of the attributes in the Raglan list of 22.)

Alexander the Great and Mithridates are not the only ancient figures to whom “hero attributes” were attributed in the literature. Sargon and Cyrus were also studied in the same context by other scholars:

Raglan wrote in complete ignorance of earlier scholarship devoted to the hero, and he was therefore unaware of the previous studies of von Hahn and Rank, for example. Raglan was parochial in other ways too. For one thing, the vast majority of his heroes came exclusively from classical (mostly Greek) sources. The first twelve heroes he treats are: Oedipus, The­seus, Romulus, Heracles, Perseus, Jason, Bellerophon, Pelops, Asclepios, Dionysos, Apollo, and Zeus. Raglan could have strengthened his case had he used some of the same heroes used by von Hahn and Rank and other scholars, e.g., such heroes as Sargon and Cyrus.

(In Quest of the Hero, 187 – my bolding)

One might even argue that the further east one went from Greece the more likely it was that historical persons matched the mythical hero reference class! Much fun can be had with statistics.

Let’s continue with Hernandez-Cela’s discussion of probability as it applies to the social sciences and history:

Social empiricists, when presenting numerical values such as the “probability” of churchgoers giving alms to the poor, might state that only in 5 percent of cases would an association as large as 60 percent or larger not obtain when instances are randomly selected. But, observing individuals, we may only say that they either do or do not give alms. In the first observation we may find that 60 percent of the total sample gave alms, but in succeeding observations this value may differ. We cannot, in fact, have any expectations of probability of giving alms to the poor, no matter how many samples we take. If, on the other hand, the sample approaches or is equal to the total population of churchgoers, then the figure represents a simple proportion, a frequency, not a probability. On the other hand, specification that only 5 percent of samples will not result in the .60 or more is meaningless. If we chose several samples all of the same size, and found that in only 5 percent of them the figure was under .60, then we still can draw no conclusions, for we know nothing about the empirical conditions prevailing in future samples. Such a claim has no basis either in theory or in observation. What the claim means is that if there were an infinite number of cases whose composition was on the average like that of the sample, then in only 5 percent of them would the percentage be smaller than .60. But, we cannot assume that any other empirical cases are on the average like the sample studied, and we cannot assume that they are infinite in number. Theoretical cases can be infinite in number, but empirical ones cannot. Such statistical claims, of course, cannot be violated empirically because they are not probability statements at all but disguised frequencies obtained by observation. Future observations cannot verify or falsify frequencies but only slightly modify their numerical value in the light of new cases. Furthermore, the statistical procedures themselves are not open to any kind of empirical verification or falsification . . .

(Systematic Empiricism, 99)

So a sample of a score of mythical heroes cannot be the basis for predicting the likelihood of any particular figure being historical or not.

The statement, “All As are Bs,” . . . . really means no more than “As have been observed with Bs.” But this statement is not a universal statement, but limited to a population. . . . Consequently no empirical generalization can act as a major premise in a deductive explanation, and empirical generalizations can never be used deductively to explain or predict.

(Systematic Empiricism, 130 — no longer from Hernandez-Cela’s chapter; italics original)

An illustration of the fallacy is set out thus:

Premise A: The probability of recovery from a streptococcus infection when treated by penicillin is close to 1.

Premise B: John Jones was treated with large doses of penicillin.

Conclusion: The probability that John Jones will recover from his streptococcus infection is close to 1.

(Systematic Empiricism, 130)

One might rephrase this as:

Premise A: The probability of a figure in the hero-class being non-historical is close to 0.

Premise B: Jesus is a figure in the hero-class.

Conclusion: The probability that Jesus is non-historical is close to 0.

But as D. and J. Willer observe,

Predictions and explanations cannot be made from [such a statement]. John Jones either does or does not recover. If he does recover the probability value of statement A is slightly increased by his case, and if he does not the probability value decreases. . . . [T]he event itself cannot be predicted with any certainty. Furthermore, if John Jones either recovers or does not, he does not recover with a probability of close to 1.

Individual facts either occur or they do not. Certain facts cannot be explained by uncertain statements. Even in ordinary everyday practical empiricism we do not make that error.

(Systematic Empiricism, 131, 135)

No two historical events are ever exactly alike. People and societies are not like that. There are always variables that make each historical event unique. Of course there are common experiences such as war or economic depression but no two wars or depressions are the same. Human events are not governed by laws in the same way geological forces or the weather are governed by scientific laws. Historians do not observe the results of “laws” in the historical data. They cannot make predictions about a unique historical event or person  — all historical events and persons are unique in some respect — on the basis of limited samples with variable (“arbitrary”) attributes. Generalizations can be made about the impacts of technologies on various kinds of social groups but particular historical events are each unique in some way. But generalizations cannot predict what a historian will find in the sources.

The most that probability (in the context of Richard Carrier’s discussion) can tell us about the likelihood of Jesus having existed is that Jesus was one of a few historical exceptions (or even the only exception) to general notions about mythical persons.

In the next post I’ll show what historians say about the certainty or otherwise of “their basic facts”.


Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2014.

Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 2012.

Hindess, Barry, and Paul Q. Hirst. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, 1975.

Raglan, Lord. The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 2011.

Rank, Otto, Raglan, and Alan Dundes. In Quest of the Hero. Mythos (Princeton, N.J.). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Willer, David, and Judith Willer. Systematic Empiricism: Critique of a Pseudoscience. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973.



2024-10-01

Can We Reliably Study Unique Events?

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Given that every historical event in some way is unique, how can historians have confidence that their research into the past is yielding reliable explanations for what happened?

The answer will depend on the type of event being studied and how historians frame their questions.

Two questions that particularly interest me are:

  • What led to the production and adoption of much of the “Old Testament” literature in Samaria (the Pentateuch) and Judea (the Pentateuch plus the historical, poetic and prophetic writings)?
  • What led to the production and adoption of the New Testament literature among certain Christians?

Notice I avoid, specifically, the question of origins of “Judaism” and “Christianity”. That’s because I don’t know how to define either of those two religions at the time of their beginnings. We can’t assume they looked the same as we find them in the record some centuries after their beginnings. But the texts are sources that we can define and work with as concrete data. They are something we can get our hands on and know what we are trying to understand with respect to origins.

But what would it take to make an explanation for the emergence of this literature to be more than guesswork or somehow guided by the fancy or prejudice of the researcher?

One tool the historian can pick up and apply in order to approach this goal comes from the field of sociology. There is nothing new about this approach:

Historians have begged or borrowed concepts and theories from many other disciplines, leading to an enriched debate around the course of human history, and the implications for both present and future. . . .  (Green and Troup)

With respect to sociology….

Photo from Harvard Faculty site

In a basic sense, sociology has always been a historically grounded and oriented enterprise. . . . The major works of those who would come to be seen as the founders of modern sociology, especially the works of Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber . . . . to varying degrees, all offered concepts and explanations meant to be used in truly historical analyses of social structures and social change. . . .

Each of the founders was so committed to making sense of the key changes and contrasts of his own epoch that he was a historically oriented social analyst . . . . None of the founders ever got entirely carried away by a philosophy of universal evolution, by formal conceptualization, or by theoretical abstraction for its own sake. Each devoted himself again and again to situating and explaining modern European social structures and processes of change. (Skocpol 1985, 1f)

What does all of that mean in practice? How does it apply to the study of a non-repeatable historical event, in particular an event that consists of striking changes in a social group’s ideas, beliefs, and texts?What do sociologists do when there is not enough evidence to confidently construct an explanation for a particular change or development in a social group? Skocpol explains:

According to this method, one looks for concomitant variations, contrasting cases where the phenomena in which one is interested are present with cases where they are absent, controlling in the process for as many sources of variation as one can, by contrasting positive and negative instances which otherwise are as similar as possible. (Skocpol 1976, 177 – my emphasis)

Where else do we find groups producing fresh origin myths comparable to those we find in the Bible? What circumstances are associated with the emergence of those kinds of myths? In what ways can we both compare and contrast the various myths themselves and what we can know of their social, political and other settings?

That kind of inquiry requires us to begin where we have the firmest evidence. In the case of the Hebrew Scriptures that means beginning where the archaeological record and the independent literary witness points us. That means beginning with the early Hellenistic era and working back only insofar as our data dictates. For the New Testament writings it means beginning in the second century and working back, again, only insofar as explanations for our data necessitate.

The inquiry means casting our net to embrace other instances of the emergence of new foundation myths and comparable apocalyptic writings and philosophical-theological treatises. Non-biblical instances of these abound in Hellenistic and Roman eras. Studies of pre-Hellenistic era and the first century of imperial Rome will also prove useful — whether as offering either better or worse explanations in order to yield a better hypothesis of time of origin or a support for a hypothesis of a later origin.

Take, for example, the Old Testament prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve “Minor Prophets”, along with narratives involving prophets like Elijah, Elisha and Jonah. We find historical instances of those kinds of persons in pre-biblical ancient Syria. See my post, Meet the Prophets of Israel’s Predecessors. The written records of those prophets provide us with a useful starting point, but we are quickly led to something quite different in the Hebrew literature. If the Syrian prophets were generally encouraging kings of city-states to continue in their piety, the biblical prophets are often chastising kings of a realm (not just a city-state) to forsake their piety and champion a different deity. Does the evidence in the Ebla and Mari archives (as well as for Assyrian prophecies) enable us to imagine those prophets adopting a similar critical stance against their kings? What conditions might help us understand such a contrast? Do we have secure evidence for the contrasting conditions?

Or to take another example, this one from the New Testament writings of Paul. Our earliest independent witness to Paul comes from the second century records of theological conflicts. Do Paul’s writings address specific contentious issues at the centre of those conflicts? (Many scholars respond reflexively with a resounding “No”. But I think they are far too hasty with that conclusion. My point is that the question is one that involves a real choice: it is not merely rhetorical.) What functions do the epistles serve among the various and competing Christian factions? Troels Engberg-Pedersen has compared some of them to Stoic treatises. What does that insight tell us about a potential audience for them as well as their possible provenance?

I have introduced only two items of inquiry. I could introduce similar questions and viable instances for comparison and contrast with the Old and New Testaments’ narratives of origins — the Pentateuch and the Gospels with Acts. Scholars have often observed similarities between the biblical literature and literature of Greek, Roman and other cultures. Other scholars have published research into the emergence of new myths and ideologies within defined social groups.. (The link is to an introductory post on Tanya S. Scheer’s study of local origin myths being manufactured in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest; for the emergence of new ideologies note John Dominic Crossan’s comparison of the “gospel” of Augustus with the NT gospels and Marianne Bonz’s comparison of Acts with the Roman foundation myth.)

I have a question after having read so much about the proposed origins of the Judeo-Christian canon. Despite the many variant views about origins — and there have been many studies introducing sociological concepts here (e.g. Bruce Malina, Bengt Holmberg, Richard Horsley, James Crossley) — I have seen precious little offering comparative studies. Richard Horsley and John Hanson had an excellent opportunity to do so with Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus, but alas, they, too, hewed to a description of Palestine alone despite the known existence of other resistance movements elsewhere in the Roman empire.

Maybe my memory has failed me for the moment or maybe there are works/authors I sorely need to seek out. So this post is a plea for assistance. If you, dear reader, know of the kinds of comparative studies I am missing and are deplored at my lack of awareness, please kindly inform me!


Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in History and Theory, Second Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Skocpol, Theda. “France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 2 (1976): 175–210.

———, ed. Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.



2024-09-28

Are Historical Sources “Innocent Until Proven Guilty”?

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by Neil Godfrey

In a recent post I praised Douglas Campbell for drawing attention to the laziness (if not “dishonesty”) of rebutting an argument with the blanket “I am not persuaded” line. In this post I come to blame him for rejecting a genuinely critical reading of source material. It is with the very essence of critical reading that he objects:

Descartes suggested, in a classic argument widely influential in the modern period, that everything is in effect guilty until proved innocent. The result was, rather famously, the reduction of all certain knowledge to the conviction that his mental processes at least guaranteed his existence. In other words, he used radical doubt as a fundamental method. Everything must be doubted until it can be demonstrated indubitably to be true. (16)

Now Descartes’ method (shorn of the extremism with which Campbell presents it) does serve well enough in everyday life and especially in the legalistic professions and scientific research enterprises. But it is possible to take issue with it on a philosophical level, as demonstrated by Wittgenstein. But is there not a valid comparison here? We know that Newtonian physics “fails” at the subatomic particle level; but we do not reject the fundamentals of Newtonian physics when taking care climbing ladders or driving a car.

Campbell wrote — and note the pejorative language in which he couches Descartes’ scepticism:

But the Cartesian method has struggled to get anywhere significant and has, moreover, been subjected to ferocious critique, not least from Wittgenstein, who pointed out (characteristically indirectly) that the use of language implies participation in a broader linguistic community, which is in turn difficult to detach from a complex broader reality that cannot be doubted in the first instance without lapsing into utter incoherence. So Descartes’s key initial claims are in fact delusional. Unfortunately, however, the critical method, which played such a significant role in the rise of the modern university, has had a long dalliance with Cartesianism, so the latter tends to live on, haunting the corridors of the academy like a restless shade. It allowed figures like Kant to reject tradition out of hand and to argue from simpler and more certain first principles, although Kant too struggled to develop his principles with the certainty and extension that he really sought. It is not a completely crass oversimplification to suggest, then, that many modern Pauline scholars, shaped in part by the traditions at work in the modern university, seem to assume, at least at times, that the “critical” assessment of evidence simply involves the application of doubt in a generic way, ultimately in the manner of Descartes. It is a posture of comprehensive skepticism. One must be unconvinced until one is convinced of something’s probity on certain grounds. But I would suggest that when practiced in this generic and universal manner, this is an invalid and self-defeating methodology and a false understanding of criticism.’ (16)

Campbell had faulted as “posturing” the “I am not persuaded” rejoinder as a substitute for critical engagement. He faults Cartesian scepticism with the same label — “posturing”.

I doubt that I would be excused from jury service if I tried to opt out by explaining that Wittgenstein tells me that my particular semantic world may not be capable of deliberating in a truly objective manner the information conveyed to me as it is coded in semantic variations other than mine. Newtonian physics is still valid, its quantum companion notwithstanding.

Campbell then proceeds to justify another misguided “howler”:

We will rely on slender snippets of evidence in what follows, because that is all that we have — occasional and fragmentary remains of conversations that took place millennia ago. But we do have evidence, and it will not do to dismiss parts of the following reconstruction with a generic claim that “this is insufficient” or “there is still not enough evidence.” If this is the evidence that we have and it explains the data in the best existing fashion, then the correct scientific conclusion must be to endorse it and not to complain that we need more data that unfortunately does not exist. (18)

That may sound like a correct scientific approach but it is not. A scientific hypothesis must rely on multiple datasets. A single experiment is never sufficient. An experiment, a survey, must of necessity be repeated in different places with different samples to be sure of the results. The medical profession will not rely on a single survey of data to recommend a particular program to treat a physical condition.

The scientific method does not build on “slender snippets of evidence” if there is no other choice. If the evidence is inadequate to answer a particular question, or on which to base a certain line of inquiry, then it is the question and the line of inquiry that must be changed.

I frequently encounter the following kinds of statements in by biblical scholars in their works relating to early Christianity or Judaism:

We historians confront a supposed event in the past, as in some text or object, as though to “try it in court,” in order to reach a verdict to establish the truth of the matter. And the principles we can best employ are those used in the practice of law:

(1) The accused is presumed (not judged) innocent unless proven guilty.
(2) The preponderance of the evidence (anything over 50%) is decisive.
(3) The verdict rendered is considered proven beyond reasonable doubt (not absolute).

(Dever 140f — Old Testament scholar arguing against fundamentalist readings of the Bible)

and arguing the case for accepting the overall integrity of the canonical text of New Testament writings…

As in a court of law, the evidence deserves to be judged innocent of being an interpolation until proven guilty. This proof must be able to stand up before the jury of scholarship, which must decide whether “guilt” has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. If there is reasonable doubt about the extraneousness of the accused data then it should not remain any longer under a cloud of suspicion. In that case the verdict must be acquittal in order to protect the innocent. If scholarship does not follow such a “rule of law,” serious injustice will be done to much innocent data.

(Wisse 170)

Livy (Wikipedia image)

Sometimes the biblical scholar will cite a (“nonbiblical”) historian for support:

Unless there is good reason for believing otherwise, one will assume that a given detail in the work of a particular historian is factual. This method places the burden of proof squarely on the person who would doubt the reliability of a given portion of the text. The alternative is to presume the text unreliable unless convincing evidence can be brought forward in support of it. While many critical scholars of the Gospels adopt this latter method, it is wholly unjustified by the normal canons of historiography. Scholars who would consistently implement such a method when studying other ancient historical writings would find the corroborative data so insufficient that the vast majority of accepted history would have to be jettisoned.29 In the words of the historian G. J. Renier:

We may find . . . an event is known to us solely through an authority based entirely upon the statements of witnesses who are no longer available. Most of the works of Livy, the first books of the history of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, belong to this category. Since there is no other way of knowing the story they tell us, we must provisionally accept their version. This brings us back full sail to accepted history as the starting point of all historical investigation.30

30. Renier, History, pp.90–91.

(Blomberg 304)

Although Blomberg cites a 1982 reprint of the classical historian’s (Renier’s) work, the original publication date stands at 1950. That is important for a reason I will explain.

But first, note the muddled metaphor in the above quotations. In a court of law it is not the witness who is “presumed innocent until proven guilty” but the one charged with a crime. Witnesses are cross examined to test their claims. Though the witness swears an oath to tell the truth their testimony is never accepted at face value. Their claims must be tested. Yet the above comparisons of the historical method confuse witnesses (sources) with the person who is on trial and seeking to prove his innocence.

In response to Dever above: In a court of law it is the one accused and on trial who is presumed innocent: it is the claims of the witnesses, the sources — not the accused — that must be tested.

In response to Wisse above: It is not the “evidence” that “deserves to be judged innocent”. It is the evidence that is tested for authenticity, relevance and reliability to determine the guilt or innocence of the one on trial.

Finally, in response to Blomberg: The Renier method of accepting the testimony of Livy for believing in the historicity of events for which there is no other evidence may have been par for the course among classicists in 1950, but by 1983 that naive approach was well and truly debunked by a series of lectures delivered by the classicist historian Moses Finley:

For reasons that are rooted in our intellectual history, ancient historians are often seduced into [accepting as historically factual] statements in the literary or documentary sources … unless they can be disproved (to the satisfaction of the individual historian). This proposition derives from the privileged position of Greek and Latin, and it is especially unacceptable for the early periods of both Greek and Roman history…

(Finley 21)

Renier referred to Livy as an example of a historian whose word he felt he had no choice but to follow. Finley pointed out the cruel truth, however:

Yet a Livy or a Plutarch cheerfully repeated pages upon pages of earlier accounts over which they neither had nor sought any control. . . .

Where did they find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit – irrespective of possible reliability – we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention.

The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated. How else could they have filled the blatant gaps in their knowledge once erudite antiquarians had observed that centuries had elapsed between the destruction of Troy and the ‘foundation’ of Rome, other than by inventing an Alban king-list to bridge the gap? Or how could they contest an existing account other than by offering an alternative, for example, to provide ideological support for, or hostility to, a particular ethnic group, such as Etruscans or Sabines, who played a major role in early Roman history? No wonder that, even in the hopelessly fragmentary state of the surviving material on early Rome, there is a bewildering variety of versions, a variety that continued to increase and multiply as late as the early Principate. Presumably no one today believes the Alban king-list to be anything but a fiction, but any suggestion that there is insufficient ground to give credence to the Roman king-list is greeted with outraged cries of ‘hyper-criticism’ …. (8f)

There was a time — it is long past — when classicists would reconstruct ancient history from their Greek and Latin sources as naively as many biblical scholars continue today to reconstruct the origins of Judaism and Christianity from the texts in the Bible. Finley added:

I suspect that Ogilvie’s slip [naive readings of ancient historians] reflects , no doubt unconsciously, the widespread sentiment that any thing written in Greek or Latin is somehow privileged, exempt from the normal canons of evaluation. (10)

Classicists have long since moved on. Perhaps it’s time for more biblical scholars to follow them.


Blomberg, Craig L. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. 2nd edition. Nottingham: IVP Academic, 2007.

Campbell, Douglas A. Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.

Dever, William G. “Christian Fundamentalism, Faith, and Archaeology.” In Misusing Scripture: What Are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible?, edited by Mark Elliott, Kenneth Atkinson, and Robert Rezetko, 131–52. Routledge, 2023.

Finley, M. I. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985. [Chapter 2 was part of a series of J. H. Gray Lectures at the Faculty of Classics of the University of Cambridge]

Wisse, Frederik W. “Textual Limits to Redactional Theory in the Pauline Corpus.” In Gospel Origins & Christian Beginnings : In Honor of James M. Robinson, edited by James E. Goehring, Charles W. Hedrick, and Jack T. Sanders, 167–78. Sonoma, Calif. : Polebridge Press, 1990.



2024-08-10

Is there Evidence for Christianity before Constantine? (Or, Some Fundamentals of Doing History)

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by Neil Godfrey

Is it necessary to have archaeological evidence to be reasonably confident that Christianity in some form existed prior to the fourth century? Some people think so, or at least they claim that the lack of archaeological evidence is reasonable grounds for doubting the existence of Christianity prior to Constantine. Let me explain why I believe that that view arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of evidence and how historical events are reconstructed by historians.

Now it is certainly true that there are clear cut cases where archaeological evidence does nullify written historical narratives. Archaeological evidence has demonstrated that the medieval stories of King Arthur, said to have performed his various exploits in late Roman times, are fictions. Similarly, archaeology has overthrown the historicity of the Genesis Patriarchs, the Exodus, the Israelite conquest of Canaan and the vast united kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon.

But what happens when we have no explicit archaeological evidence for a historical narrative? The archaeological evidence that specifically informs us about the conquests of Alexander the Great is virtually nonexistent. We have coins with Alexander’s bust stamped on them but they don’t tell us about his military adventures from Egypt to India. For that information we only have very late (Roman era) written accounts. Fortunately, however, the authors of those histories inform readers that they were drawing upon historical records composed by Alexander’s contemporaries. Further, given the widespread influence of Greek culture and Greek settlements throughout the Levant and Mesopotamia after Alexander’s time, we have good reason to believe that something dramatic happened to give rise to this new situation, and the surviving testimonies of historians who read writings of Alexander’s contemporaries are thus by and large made credible.

Again, we have no archaeological evidence from the fifth century BCE testifying to the historical existence of Plato. There are no surviving manuscripts of Plato’s works from his own time. But we do have scores of later manuscripts that are evidence for an activity of reasonably faithful copying of Plato’s dialogues. We can cross check these writings with manuscripts of copied works of other authors who were evidently contemporaries of Plato. So we again have reasonable grounds for believing in the historical existence and literary productivity of Plato.

But what is the difference between primary and secondary sources? It is on this question that I understand some doubts about pre-Constantinian Christianity arise.

Ranke, Leopold von (1795 – 1886)

Primary sources are those that clearly belong to the period being investigated. Secondary sources are from times later than the events or persons being studied. One biblical historian whom I have quoted in the past because he wrote at some length on this question is Niels Peter Lemche. Lemche takes readers ‘back to the basics’, in this case to the writings of the “father of modern history”, Leopold von Ranke.

When von Ranke and historians since his time are referring to an acknowledged contemporary source, they indicate first of all that kind of information which can be dated without problems. They also say that the source must physically belong to the period about which it is taken to be firsthand information. A slab of stone with an inscription found in situ, that is, where it was originally placed by the person who erected the stone to commemorate some event of his own day, is without doubt a primary and contemporary source. A description of the same item found in some ancient literary source is, however, not a contemporary source except in the case where it goes back to the same time as the stone inscription. Thus Livy’s description of the Second Punic War is not a contemporary source, as it is removed by about two hundred years from the days of Hannibal and Scipio. Suetonius’s life of August is not a primary source because it is about a hundred years later than the time of August. The Monumentum Ancyranum1 can, however, be considered a firsthand piece of evidence from this period, since it relies on an official document from the days of August, and was placed on his temple in Ankara shortly after his death.

1. An inscription found on the Temple of August in Ankara, based on an official document authorized in the last year of August’s reign (C.E. 14), partly based, however, on an earlier source, the Res Gestae, and edited before it was published. The inscription has been known since 1555.

Lemche, Niels Peter. The Israelites in History and Tradition. London : Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. p. 22

A Digression on Leopold von Ranke and Positivist History

Now the mention of Ranke has the unfortunate side effect of causing some readers to roll their eyes in despair while complaining, “But von Ranke was a positivist and that kind of history went out of fashion by the middle of the twentieth century.” To those who react that way (and there are a good many biblical scholars who are guilty) I must point out that “positivism” is too often confused with a preoccupation with “getting the facts right”, or with a history that is “all about ‘the facts'”. No, that’s a misunderstanding of positivism.

Positivism in history is an attempt to treat history as a science, as an effort to discover laws of historical processes, as summed up in an earlier reference if mine to Collingwood. The facts are still bedrock.

We have heard of “history wars” in recent times. Historians continue today to research to find “the actual facts” that lie behind various controversial questions. Was there a culpable genocide of Australian aborigines by white settlers throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries? Facts and evidence lie at the very heart of that debate. Focus on “the facts” is still of first importance. Hewing to facts is not committing the sin of positivism.

But there is another way of understanding “positivist history” and in this second sense Ranke is sometimes upheld as an exemplar. The idea that history can be an objective reconstruction of what “exactly” happened in the past — a fact-based, “objective and true” portrayal of events, especially political events — is another form of history that is no longer practised, generally speaking. Nobody can escape bias of some kind; everybody necessarily perceives events through a particular point of view. Nor are political and military events the totality of human experience: history has branched out into investigating economic, social, cultural, family and personal events.

As for being “completely objective”, the American Civil War is viewed by some historians as a conflict over states rights; by other historians as a conflict over slavery. That does not mean that there is no absolute truth to the question but it does remind us that all events are perceived through our preconceptions and biases. The historian ideally will be aware of their biases and make allowances for them in their research and presentation of their narrative. To support one point of view against another a historian will seek to present more factual evidence on which their point of view rests.

As for Ranke, he is perhaps best known for his famous phrase . . .

To history has been given the function of judging the past, of instructing men for the profit of future years. The present attempt does not aspire to such a lofty undertaking. It merely wants to show how it essentially was (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

From Preface to the First Edition of Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples (October 1824), in: Ranke, Leopold von. The Theory and Practice of History. New York, N.Y: Irvington Publishers, 1983. p. 86

Some critics translate the phrase as “how it actually was” and thus present a more “positivist” view of Ranke than others would necessarily warrant.

Today historians are more aware of the inevitable bias or subjectivity of a “point of view” when examining events, and of the impossibility of fully objectively recreating a wholly true account of a past event, but searching out and understanding “the facts” is still paramount in most cases.

Photos of my team teachers from an old school album

In high school I was introduced to history by a couple of teachers who were pioneering a new kind of history-teaching, J. H. Allsopp and H. R. Cowie, authors of the two-volume text Challenge and Response. Students were immersed in a questioning-and-research approach to each historical period, beginning with the French Revolution. The springboard question was derived from the famous historian Arnold Toynbee’s thesis that historical change follows a “law” of civilizations responding to specific challenges. As students we were challenged by a positivist thesis (not that we knew anything about the term ‘positivism’ in those high school years) and taught to question. That was anything but a dry fact-based study of history. When we came to studying Marxism we were introduced to another positivist form of history, a grossly simplified form of Hegel’s theory that a thesis produces an antithesis and out of the ensuing clash of these opposites emerges a synthesis . . . . which in turn becomes a new thesis, and so on. (Hence the theory that the owners of production produce a working class and the resulting clash leads to a classless society.) Especially since the later 1960s historical studies in universities have moved away from the idea that through history historians can discover laws of human behaviour. Historical positivism is “past history” now.

The point is this: Ranke’s fundamental principle is that the facts must first and foremost be determined by sources known to be from the actual time and place of the events being investigated:

But from what sources could this be newly investigated? The foundations of the present writing, the origins of its subject matter, are memoirs, diaries, letters, reports from embassies, and original narratives of eyewitnesses. Other writings were considered only when they seemed either to have been immediately deduced from the former or to equal them through some kind of original information.

Ranke, Leopold von. The Theory and Practice of History. New York, N.Y: Irvington Publishers, 1983. p. 86

That principle is still the foundation of most historical research today. (I am bypassing here discussions relating to postmodernist theories about knowledge and adhering to the same general principles as are applicable in common everyday discourse and courts of law with respect to the value we ascribe to testimonies of various kinds — hearsay, recorded, witnessed, etc.)

Back to the Question: Evidence for Pre-Constantinian Christianity

One proponent of the view that Christianity as we understand the term was a fourth century invention has proposed that historical evidence can be divided into two types:

  1. Primary evidence — which means archaeological evidence, or “real knowledge” from the time in question;
  2. Secondary evidence — which survives only in manuscripts physically dated long after Constantine’s time and is therefore “hypothetical” knowledge”.

Here is where I believe we are getting confused with terminology.

To begin with, notice that in the preceding section we saw that evidence is divided into two kinds:

  1. that which can be dated without problems to the time or event under investigatio
  2. that which is dated after that event.

It is not true that the ONLY kind of evidence that can be dated “without problems to the time or event under investigation” is archaeological evidence. As we saw above, some manuscripts dated long after the time of Alexander the Great or Plato contain information that can be dated “without problems” to the times of Alexander the Great and Plato. Our manuscript evidence is testimony to multiple efforts to copy those texts through the ages.

To contradict this point and argue that the texts were invented in late antiquity or the early middle ages is to meet the “conspiracy theory” fallacy.

Yes, it is theoretically possible that all witnesses, and all knowing associates of such witnesses, who were in any way involved in a cover-up or falsification of the historical record, such as (let’s say) the moon landing, conspired to maintain the public fiction. But life experience leads me to think that such a coherently successful accomplishment among diverse witnesses (or “non-witnesses”) is unlikely. Unless evidence can be produced that suggests that such a widespread agreement across time to falsify the historical record, or data/sources upon which the historical account is produced can be shown to have been fraudulently manipulated, then I think it is reasonable to believe in the existence of Plato as an author of dialogs and in the conquering actions of Alexander the Great.

So where does that leave the evidence for the existence of pre-fourth century Christianity?

Let’s take the Gospel of Mark. We first discover an explicit reference to this work in the writings of Irenaeus, a late second century “church father”. Those who propose a post Constantine origin for this gospel also propose a post Constantine date for the writings attributed to Irenaeus. If we were to accept such an argument we would need to be mindful of all the writings of Irenaeus and imagine a situation where they would be manufactured for nefarious purposes to belong to a time much earlier than that in which they were really written. When one looks at the totality of those writings one would surely conclude that an awful lot of effort was spent on producing such a fraud. But let’s keep it simple and confine ourselves to the Gospel of Mark.

A literary analysis of the Gospel of Mark indicates that it fits well with the first and second Jewish wars (66-70 and 135 CE). Its “little apocalypse” chapter has been dated to either war. Its theological outlook is inconsistent with the Christology of later periods. The same gospel denigrates Peter and the twelve disciples as faithless failures; it presents a Jesus who appears to have become a “son of God” at the moment of his baptism. It is unlikely in the extreme that a fourth century forger who believed in the exaltation of the Twelve Apostles and the pre-existence and inherent divinity of Christ would have written such a gospel. Other gospels followed that evidently sought to “correct” Mark’s flaws.

I think it is safe to conclude that the widely varying presentations of Jesus and the apostles (including Paul) would not have been produced by a single-minded program to make Christianity appear older (back into the second or first centuries) than it actually was. Is it really likely that such a program produced gospels that contradicted the later orthodox christology and the revered place of the apostles and then followed up by composing other gospels that found different ways to correct those evidently earlier efforts?

Dating ancient texts

Now it is certainly not valid to assume that a historical narrative that we read in a text is “true”. We all know the difference between historical fiction and real history and we look for signs that enable us to distinguish the two.

However, to continue with our Gospel of Mark example, we find in this gospel prominent allusions to false christs, crucifixion, destruction of the temple, and so forth — all of which can be found to match the events of the Jewish war from the late first century and right through the time of Trajan and Jewish messianic rebellions and on to the events of the final rebellion under Bar Kochba in the 130s CE. One may well imagine a later author fabricating a text to appear as if it were written in that period, but how could one imagine the same author presenting a view of both Jesus and the apostles that was contradicted by the established church of a much later time?

In this case we find the evidence strongest for a time and place that did not highly esteem the apostles and did not place a strong emphasis on the pre-existent “sonship” of Jesus or the importance of his resurrection appearances. (The latter are absent in the Gospel of Mark.)

The Gospel of Mark is evidently a product of pre-fourth century conditions when Jesus could be made a son of God at his baptism and when the disciples could be depicted as failures. It now belongs to the orthodox canon but it is made safe for orthodoxy by being placed alongside other gospels that “corrected” Mark’s apparent failings.

Real versus Theoretical Knowledge?

I have heard it said that archaeology is “real” evidence and later texts are “theoretical” evidence — implying that evidence derived from stones is superior to that derived from texts found on much later surviving manuscripts.

This is a false dichotomy.

Mesha stele (Wikimedia)

A stone inscription speaking of a person’s exploits tells me nothing unless I first interpret it. Is the person described really a historical person or are they a false image of someone else pretending to be greater than they in fact were? Are the inscribed exploits true or a lie or something in between? Is the inscription a fictional propaganda employing contemporary literary tropes? Note how even a stone inscription must be first “interpreted” before it can be understood:

As with the Hammurapi, Sargon and Idrimi monuments, it is more than style and form that establish the Active qualities of Mesha’s inscription. Literary metaphor also lies behind the use of the name Omri itself. Omri ‘dwelling in Moab’ is not a person doing anything in Transjordan, but an eponym, a literary personification of Israel’s political power and presence. It is clear that the reference to Omri in the Mesha stele is literary, not historical.

Thompson, Thomas L. The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. New York: Basic Books, 1999. p. 13

You may disagree with Thompson’s interpretation but whatever your view you will need to justify your alternative reading – as Thompson does his. Either way, it should be clear that a stone inscription does not automatically give us “pure historical fact”: stone inscriptions need to be interpreted as much as does the text of a manuscript. We cannot say that the former source gives us “real” knowledge while the latter gives us “theoretical” knowledge. Both kinds of data need to be tested for provenance and original meaning.

The information gleaned from a stone inscription is just as much a product of interpretation as is the information we glean from a late surviving manuscript.

Both must be subject to analysis and interpretation before we think we know what they have to tell us.

It is a fallacy to say that we have no “real” knowledge about Christianity prior to the fourth century because we have no pre-fourth century archaeological evidence for Christianity while all our text-based knowledge is “only theoretical”.

What we have, most fundamentally, is raw data. Raw data must be interpreted. It tells us nothing apart from our interpretation of it. Raw data can come from stone monuments and manuscripts alike, whatever their date. (I could cover all of this argument in many pages of text but am hoping for now that the above context makes my point clear.)

Conclusion

In fact I believe we do have archaeological evidence for Christianity before Constantine but in this post I am addressing the claim that manuscript evidence is somehow less “real” than archaeological evidence.

My argument is that all “historical knowledge” is at some level “theoretical” but that fact does not make it any less “real” or “valid” at the same time. I could argue on philosophical and epistemological grounds that newspaper reports and diaries from relevant persons in the last century do not “prove” that Australian aborigines were displaced wholesale, but that would not change the reality of the interpreted evidence from a layman’s — or courtroom juror’s — perspective.

The claim that all of our evidence for Christianity physically post dates the time of Constantine and was actually the creation of scribes from that era and later falls for the same reason other conspiracy theories fall. Yes, of course Christian scribes were “biased” and yes, we do have some evidence that they doctored manuscripts. At the same time, we also have evidence that they preserved and copied texts that were not doctrinally consistent with fourth century orthodoxy. They found ways to preserve “unorthodox” writings without denying their own faith.

Archaeological evidence, when tested, can be securely dated to a particular time in question but the “truth” or otherwise of its inscriptions is just as “real” as are the “truths or otherwise” of text written in ink on manuscripts. All data needs to be tested for authenticity, provenance, context and interpreted. The absence of archaeological evidence from the fifth century BCE testifying to the existence a dialog-writing Plato does not mean our knowledge of Plato is “theoretical” as distinct from “real”, and the same applies to the existence of gospels, epistles and other Christian literature prior to the time of Constantine.


2024-06-11

Can we salvage history from beneath Josiah’s reforms?

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by Neil Godfrey

My interest in these posts is in reviewing the basis for some historical fact behind the Biblical narrative of Josiah’s reforms. Other questions about the textual problems in 2 Kings 22-23 and difficulties with identifying in that passage the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy will come later.

So after discussing the evidence of seal images and amulet inscriptions, Christoph Uehlinger (UC) clarifies the question he is addressing:

Within the limits of this article, we may cut down the historical problem to the following question: Does 2 Kings 23 list measures that are most plausibly understood against the background of the political and religious situation of Judah during the latter part of the seventh century BCE than at any other period? (CU, 300 — all bolded highlighting is mine)

UC’s answer to his question:

At least two measures appear to be directed against cult practices or institutions whose introduction in Judah must have been originally connected with the Assyrian expansion and the accompanying reception of Assyro-Aramean traditions of astral cults:

    • the removal of the horses and chariots of the sun-god
    • and the suppression of the כמרים priests.

(300 – my formatting)

Horses and Chariots of the Sun God

Assyrian horse associated with temple of Sun God Shamash: Wikimedia Commons

2 Kings 23:11 (NIV)

He removed from the entrance to the temple of the Lord the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan-Melek. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun.

The Hebrew word for “official” in that text (סָּרִ֔יס — saris) is understood to be an Assyrian civic title, not a local religious or priestly one.

The horses are probably living animals, not crafted statues, given that the Hebrew uses the word for “dedicated” or “ordained” as with priests (v.5) and not the word for “made” that is used in connection with roof top altars that were removed (v.12). Further, they appear to require the care of an official.

The connection between horse and sun-god has no tradition in Palestine itself but is typical of Assyria, especially during the late eighth and early seventh century (the time of Sargon and Sennacherib), when the horse was repeatedly represented as the symbolic animal of the sun-god.

(302)

The Assyrians used horses dedicated to the sun god for divination purposes. But as UC acknowledges, the Assyrians were no longer a presence in Judah at the time of Josiah, having been replaced by the Egyptians. At most, UC can suggest that since Assyria was long gone, the “time was ripe to come back to local [Yahwistic] custom”. He adds that removing cult horses would also have a cost-saving benefit.

“Idolatrous Priests”

2 Kings 23:5 (NIV)

He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem—those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts. 

The word being translated as “idolatrous priests”, kemarim (כְּמָרִ֗ים), is of Syrian origin and associated with the moon god. Given the rarity of the term in the Hebrew Bible it may be inferred that these priests were no longer present after the exile, and if so . . .

It is therefore scarcely conceivable that their dissolution by King Josiah was only an invention of a post-exilic redactor. (305)

Roof Altars

2 Kings 23:12 (NIV)

He pulled down the altars the kings of Judah had erected on the roof near the upper room of Ahaz, and the altars Manasseh had built in the two courts of the temple of the Lord. He removed them from there, smashed them to pieces and threw the rubble into the Kidron Valley.

Zephaniah 1:5 and Jeremiah 19:13 link roof-top worship to astral deities.

The passages quoted from the books of Zephaniah and Jeremiah, which assume that worship on the roofs continued after Josiah’s reform, therefore do not contradict the historicity of Josiah’s measures, since they remained confined to the temple and, again, affected a specific cult practice, namely sacrifice. (305)

Conclusion — and my response

CU thus suggests that the end of the seventh century “offers the most plausible religious-historical background for the three reform measures discussed above.” That may be so, but are we still not a step away from establishing whether or not any reforms took place at all?

UC underscores the following points:

  1. All three purges (horses/chariots, idolatrous priests, roof altars) relate to “practices that have lost their plausibility in view of the changed political climate with . . . lessened contacts with northern Syria and Assyria.”
  2. All three focus on the Jerusalem Temple.
  3. All three are associated with astral worship.

On the other hand, one may be inclined to think that points 1 and 3 had little relevance by the time of Josiah given that they are more closely associated with Syrian and Assyrian practices and those powers had lost their influence over Judah by Josiah’s time.

UC is seeking a midway between “minimalists” who rely on the archaeological witness to the exclusion of textual narratives that cannot be established as existing until generations later, and “maximalists” who rely on the textual narrative unless it can be proven in error. I am not so sure that a mid-way can be justified. Yes, UC can point to historical data that coheres in varying degrees with the biblical narrative, but by interpreting that data through the biblical narrative — even allowing for modifications to that narrative to make it fit the known historical and archaeological details — is still fundamentally a method that relies on a late text to through which to interpret much earlier data.

But how would/does UC respond to my misgivings? Here are five pertinent passages with my responses.

One:

However, ‘methodological minimalists’ should not take their task too easily. Measures possibly taken under king Josiah in order to redesign the Judahite state cult cannot simply be dismissed because they are not explicitly mentioned as such in primary sources: such a conclusion would proceed from an argumentum e silentio which should be inadmissible for maximalists and minimalists alike. (285f)

“Simply be dismissed because …. not explicitly mentioned” can be taken as a pejorative put-down of the methodology of the “minimalists”. Rather, I don’t see any question of “dismissing” information that is “not explicitly” clear in the sources. Instead of “dismissal” of the “non-explicit” there is an attempt to examine each type of evidence in its own right. One might justifiably prefer to examine primary or archaeological sources independently of any other kind of evidence as the first stage of research. The second stage would be to examine the secondary narrative sources independently as far as possible against their verifiable provenance. In other words, the secondary sources for Josiah should, as far as possible, be studied as primary sources for the time and place from which they originate. Where we cannot be certain about their provenance, it is reasonable to see how the narratives might be explained in the context of the earliest period for which we can establish their existence. If nothing makes sense in that independently confirmed context, then we can test the narratives against earlier and more hypothetical periods of origin.

There is no argumentum e silento. The arguments are attuned to the voices of each type of evidence within its own verifiable context. Nor is this taking a “too easy” route. One might even say that the problems to be solved are doubled since we are grappling with two types of evidence, each on its own terms, instead of rationalizing them into a third source that is of our own making and that means we have to fudge the edges of both sources to make them fit with each other.

Two:

No serious historian should dismiss secondary sources on the sole argument that they cannot be confirmed with utter precision. On the other hand, we must of course endeavor to build only upon such secondary sources that plausibly fit the primary framework based on primary sources. (307)

Again, I wonder if I am right to detect another slight pejorative in the expression “with utter precision”. “Utter precision” might seem to imply that there can be room to fudge our data to make it fit a hypothesis. I don’t see anything wrong with accepting date ranges for known data (astral seal images, the influence of Assyrian cult in Judah, the silver amulets) and working with where they lead – whether stopping short of Josiah’s time or extending either side of it. Let the data speak without trying to refine it more precisely than it is.

When UC calls for using secondary sources “that plausibly fit the primary framework”, I think this and earlier posts have shown that his method is problematic. Rather than take the biblical narrative about Josiah’s cult centralization or purification or renewal, he has not UC actually changed the biblical narrative so that we come to imagine Josiah merely discarding practices that were no longer relevant in his time (e.g. Assyrian astral worship) or even undertaking a cost-saving measure? By reimagining the narrative to “plausibly fit” the primary evidence, has not UC actually replaced the biblical narrative with a new and different account that exists nowhere except in the historian’s imagination? Certainly, we can hypothesize that the author changed the facts before him to create a new narrative of more significant theological import, but why not simply hypothesize that the author drew upon known customs and traditions to create a historical fiction in a manner not very different from historical novelists do today?

Three:

The minimalist approach becomes extremely maximalist when it approaches the sources with inappropriate expectations, just to drop them as soon as they do not respond to gross questions. . . . We can know so little about the past, that we should endeavor to interpret adequately what little we have. (307)

There is an implicit circularity here, I think. Yes, we “know so little about the past”. And by all means we certainly “should endeavor to interpret what little we have.” It is not valid to see how we can make disparate sources from variable provenances throw light on each other until we first establish a valid argument that they are related in the way tradition and orthodoxy have led us to believe they are related. If we make invalid assumptions about the genre and provenance of our written sources we will almost certainly not be advancing genuine historical knowledge if we try to relate them to the real history behind their surface narratives. We would be in gross error if we found ourselves using Walter Scott’s novels to reconstruct medieval England, or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s saga to reconstruct a historical King Arthur. But this returns me to my response to point #One above.

Four:

Nothing remains for exegetes interested in historical research but to take note of the new methodological hierarchy which implies the necessary subordination of non-archaeological, secondary documentation, including the biblical texts, to primary data. (308)

Yes and no. Certainly there is a hierarchy of sources about any given time and place in the past. Primary sources, those produced in the time in question, surely take precedence. That does not mean we accept them uncritically because we know kings like to stretch the truth when making public boasts. But sources that derive from a later time need to be assessed according to what their authors could have known and what they wanted their audiences to read and believe. Those things may not cohere with the realities of the past. If those later sources can, however, demonstrate that they themselves are drawing upon “primary sources” since lost to us, then we are indeed fortunate in having more witnesses about the past to help us in our research.

But what is not allowed, in my view, is using a hierarchy such as the following:

  1. Exhaust all we can from primary sources
  2. Finding that we still lack much desired information, turn to secondary sources
  3. Use secondary sources to fill in the gaps.

No, valid historical research is not that simple. Here is a valid approach:

  1. Exhaust all we can from primary sources
  2. Finding that we still lack much desired information, turn to secondary sources to see if they contain evidence of further primary sources otherwise lost to us, (or see if they contain information that is evidently reliant upon lost primary sources otherwise lost to us)
  3. Use the data from primary sources evident in the secondary sources.

Five:

In the interest both of historical and theological research, we should therefore neither overstrain this link with historicist or biblicist naiveté, nor simply leap over the gap with dismissively minimalist assumptions. (308)

I hope my above responses have demonstrated that a valid “minimalist” approach is not “dismissive” of any justifiable source material.

Next post, I’ll consider another argument to explain the existence of the Josiah reform narrative in 2 Kings 22-23.


Uehlinger, Christoph. “Was There a Cult Reform under King Josiah? The Case for a Well-Grounded Minimum” In Good Kings and Bad Kings: The Kingdom of Judah in the Seventh Century BCE, edited by Lester L. Grabbe, 279–316. London: T&T Clark, 2007. https://www.academia.edu/19958547/Was_There_A_Cult_Reform_under_King_Josiah_The_Case_for_a_Well_Grounded_Minimum_2005_



2023-09-27

Not All Historians Are Equal

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by Neil Godfrey

I have often tried to point out how historians as a rule have very different standards and methods for verifying past events from those we too often find among Bible scholars writing about Christian origins and Jesus himself. Two statements of “non-biblical” historians I have quoted in the past epitomize the divide between the two fields:

From the viewpoint of a professional historian, there is a good deal in the methods and assumptions of most present-day biblical scholars that makes one not just a touch uneasy, but downright queasy.Donald Harman Akenson

and when discussing a prominent New Testament scholar’s efforts to sift the historically probable from the mythical accretions in the gospels a leading ancient historian concluded:

This application of the ‘psychological method’ is neat, plausible, commonsensical. But is the answer right? Not only in this one example but in the thousands upon thousands of details in the story upon which Goguel or any other historian must make up his mind? I do not know what decisive tests of verifiability could possibly be applied. The myth-making process has a kind of logic of its own, but it is not the logic of Aristotle or of Bertrand Russell.Moses Israel Finley

But look what another prominent modern historian has written about the historical veracity underlying the Gospels. It is found in his book titled A Student’s Guide to the Study of History.

Consider the very words of the Gospel of St. Luke, Chapter 2:

And it came to pass, that in those days there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that the whole world should be enrolled. / This enrolling was first made by Cyrinus, the governor of Syria. / And all went to be enrolled, every one into his own city. / And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem: because he was of the house and family of David. To be enrolled with Mary his espoused wife, who was with child. / And it came to pass, that when they were there, her days were accomplished, that she should be delivered. / And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn….

This description—or account—is exactly and thoroughly historical. There is nothing even remotely comparable to that in the accounts of the coming of other gods or founders of religions, whether Greek or Roman or Oriental. Unlike other founders of religions before him, Jesus Christ was a historical person. For believing Christians he was not only a historical person of course, but that is not our argument here. The historicity of Jesus Christ (which we may regard as God’s great gift to mankind) is incontestable: there exist Jewish and Roman and other sources about the fact of his existence, though not of course of all his deeds and sayings (or of their meaning). The very writing of St. Luke is marked by the evidence of something new at that time: of historical thinking.  — John Lukacs, pp 14f. of Student’s Guide — italics original in all quotations; bolding is mine.

Three things to note:

  1. The primary reason Lukacs claims to believe in the historicity of Jesus is the writing style of the Gospel of Luke;
  2. Who would ever have expected to read in a book for students of history the reminder that Jesus Christ may be regarded as “God’s great gift to mankind”?
  3. Other sources testifying to Jesus are added in what appears to be a secondary note that merely confirms the conclusion to be drawn from the first.

Four points to ponder:

— 1. The actual content of that passage in Luke’s gospel is itself fiction! There never was a world-wide census requiring persons to return to their “own cities” to be counted. Such an event is entirely fanciful. Imagine the nightmare of trying to enforce it in reality. The scenario is a fairy-tale event told in the historical genre. The same historical genre goes on to depict angels in the sky talking to shepherds, a virgin giving birth and a host of other miraculous and supernatural events. Are we really to conclude from the “historical style” of Luke that it must be about genuine historical persons and events?

— 2. The Jewish and Roman sources are all written a century and more after the supposed event and can only tell us what some people at that time believed. Worse, some of those sources have a history of being disputed as forgeries. Those kinds of sources — where the origins of the narratives cannot be known — are never embraced as secure and foundational in other historical research.

— 3. Second Temple Judean fiction is known to embrace the historical style but that is no reason to conclude that the contents of those narratives are historical. Witness the historical style introducing the fanciful stories of Esther . . .

This is what happened in the days of Xerxes, who reigned over 127 provinces from India to Cush. In those days King Xerxes sat on his royal throne in the citadel of Susa. In the third year of his reign, Xerxes held a feast for all his officials and servants. The military leaders of Persia and Media were there, along with the nobles and princes of the provinces. And for a full 180 days he displayed the glorious riches of his kingdom and the magnificent splendor of his greatness.

of Tobit . . .

The tale of Tobit son of Tobiel, son of Ananiel, son of Aduel, son of Gabael, of the lineage of Asiel and tribe of Naphtali. In the days of Shalmaneser king of Assyria, he was exiled from Thisbe, which is south of Kedesh-Naphtali in Upper Galilee, above Hazor, some distance to the west, north of Shephat.

of Daniel . . .

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. These he carried off to the temple of his god in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his god. Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king’s service some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility.

— 4. But fiction told with historical verisimilitude was not unique to the Judeans. The Greco-Roman literary world knew it well. If Homer had written a history of the Trojan war with gods fighting humans, a later author appealed to the more rational and sceptical readers of a later generation by finding an account that explained “how it really happened – historically!”

Cornelius Nepos sends greetings to his Sallustius Crispus.

While I was busily engaged in study at Athens, I found the history which Dares the Phrygian wrote about the Greeks and the Trojans. As its title indicates, this history was written in Dares’ own hand. I was very delighted to obtain it and immediately made an exact translation into Latin, neither adding nor omitting anything, nor giving any personal touch. Following the straightforward and simple style of the Greek original, I translated word for word. Thus my readers can know exactly what happened according to this account and judge for themselves whether Dares the Phrygian or Homer wrote the more truthfully-Dares, who lived and fought at the time the Greeks stormed Troy, or Homer, who was born long after the War was over. When the Athenians judged this matter, they found Homer insane for describing gods battling with mortals. . . . — letter claiming to be by the discoverer (Dares the Phrygian) of an eye-witness account of the Trojan War (by Dictys of Crete)

There are people today who still believe in “a historical core” behind one ancient tale told with all seriousness, even though it was originally presented by a philosopher as a myth:

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.

Other examples could fill a book but I’ll limit myself to just one particularly dry, matter-of-fact biographical/historical narrative introduction:

I set out one day from the Pillars of Hercules and sailed with a following wind into the western ocean. My voyage was prompted by an active intellect and a passionate interest in anything new; the object I proposed to myself was to discover the limits of the ocean and what men dwelt beyond it. For this reason I took a great deal of food on board, and plenty of water. I got hold of fifty men of my own age and interests, as well as quite a store of arms, hired the best navigator I could find at a considerable salary, and strengthened the ship—a light transport—for a long and trying voyage. — from Lucian, A True History.

Is there any reason to disbelieve this introduction? Yes, there is. In this case the author warned us of exactly what he was about to write. We read in the lines immediately preceding that passage:

My subject, then, is things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else: . . . So my readers must not believe a word I say.

The author was in fact writing a parody of works that pretended to be “true histories”:

I trust the present work will be found to inspire such reflection. My readers will be attracted . . . by the novelty of the subject, the appeal of the general design, and the conviction and verisimilitude with which I compound elaborate prevarications, . . . So when I came across all these writers, I did not feel that their romancing was particularly reprehensible; evidently it was already traditional, even among professed philosophers; though what did surprise me was their supposition that nobody would notice they were lying.

So why would Lukacs have confessed to being persuaded by the historical style of the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke — apparently blind to the fact that that style was being used to to describe a fictional event? Another historian pointed us to where we are likely to find the answer:

[T]he reader . . . must re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian. Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St Jude’s, goes round to a friend at St Jude’s to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean ; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. — E. H. Carr, p. 23 of What is History?

John Lukacs (source)

We don’t have to ask a friend who may know John Lukacs. We have Lukacs giving an account of the bee in his bonnet in We at the Center of the Universe. There he writes:

. . . I happen to believe in God, and that Christ was his son. (Why I believe this, or perhaps why I wish to believe it, is not easy to tell, being part and parcel of my interior life — something that does not belong here.) Still, what this belief means, and what it ought to mean, is a recognition that Christ’s life among us, on this earth, may have been the cen­tral event in the history of mankind. If so, then this histor­ical event took place in what was then (and not only then but since and in the future) the center of the universe. I know that, being such a believer, I am among a minority of human beings. . . . 

To this I wish to add my anxiety about many believing Christians whose belief in Christ may be honest, sincere, and profound. Evidence suggests that their view of the world and of its history now exists together with, or at least alongside, their belief in endless progress, including the power of humankind to know and rule more and more of the universe, beyond this small planet where God makes us live. Sometimes I fear that as the life of Christ—only 2,000 years ago, a tiny portion of what we know of the history of mankind—becomes further and further away because of the passage of time, the meaning of his words, his life, his calvary may weaken in the imagination of men. . . . — Lukacs, pp. 8f of At the Center.

 


Akenson, Donald Harman. Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds. New edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Carr, Edward Hallet. What Is History? New York: Vintage, 1967.

Finley, M. I. Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972.

Frazer, Jr., R. M., trans. The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian. Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1966.

Lucian. “A True Story.” In Collected Ancient Greek Novels, edited by B. P. Reardon, translated by B. P. Reardon, 619–49. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Lukacs, John. A Student’s Guide to the Study of History. Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014.

Lukacs, John. We at the Center of the Universe. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustines Press, 2017.

Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.



2022-04-04

Historical Research: The Basics

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by Neil Godfrey

Hello again everyone. It’s been too long since I’ve posted here. One of the reasons for my absence was that I have been working my way through several new works in other languages that I have had to scan and translate mostly “by machine” as I go. Reading one work led to several more and so it went. One result: I now have many new perspectives and questions relating to the New Testament and related literature, especially (but not only) to the Gospel of Mark, Book of Revelation and the Ascension of Isaiah.

Leopold von Ranke (“father of modern source-based history”) — still relevant today: see the last quotation by Richard Evans in this post.

While I was reading I sometimes sought escape by kind of doodling on and off on the Biblical Criticism & History Forum – earlywritings.com. While there, I had occasion to list what historians themselves have explained are the building blocks of historical research. That is, their own explanations of how they determine the facts of what happened long ago. From these raw facts historians reconstruct history itself and develop hypotheses about causes and the nature of the cultures and so forth, but “bedrock facts” come first. (Not that the information I posted on the forum had much impact since certain persons continued to discuss historical questions according to their long-held habits of thought that break all the rules for determining “facts”. They’re having fun and maybe that’s what matters most to some of them. C’est la vie.)

In sum, the methods common to historians and that they themselves have explained are these:

  • Look for a “primary source”, generally meaning a source that is contemporary with the person or event to which it testifies.

One example: Accounts of events and persons are found in writings that we have valid reasons to believe were produced by contemporaries of those persons and events.

  • Look for reasons to have some level of confidence in those sources — or not: e.g. do we know who wrote them and why?

Above all:

  • Look for independent corroboration of the information in the sources or for general trustworthiness of the source.

An example I like to use is Socrates. How do historians know Socrates existed?

We have writings about Socrates that we can determine were written by his students (e.g. Plato, Xenophon), other writings that confirm that those texts are indeed by whom they say they are (e.g. Aristotle’s references to Plato’s works), and we also have contemporary works that are critical of Socrates, mocking him (e.g. by the playwright Aristophanes) — that is, confirmation of Socrates that appears to be independent of the works of Plato and Xenophon.

Those principles are not always spelled out by historians in their publications but they are generally noticeable to any reader who is looking for “how they know” what they are writing about.

Below is a collation of various quotations by historians and philosophers of history that do make the above principles explicit. It is a revised copy of what I posted on the BC&H forum.

Rules of historical reasoning

The New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham has argued that a historian should give the benefit of the doubt to any testimony. That is a fine starting principle when one needs to get along with neighbours and colleagues, but few nonbiblical historians would agree that it applies to the sources from long ago. Continue reading “Historical Research: The Basics”


2021-09-05

How to Read Historical Evidence (and any other information) Critically

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by Neil Godfrey

no claim is above the requirement of justification

Anyone who reads widely about how historians work and how we can know anything about the past — as well as how to critically analyse news and media reports and any information at all — will likely at some point come across an interesting perspective in an article by Peter Kosso, Observation of the Past. I describe it as “interesting” because Kosso compares how we (should) read scientific instruments with how we (should) read our sources of information.

Here are some key points from that article.

There are three ways that knowledge of history is said to differ from our knowledge of the natural sciences:

  1. History is largely the study of unique objects and singular events. Thus history cannot make generalizations about principles seen in nature. (Historians who once did try to find laws in history were called positivists but they are a rare species now.)
  2. Historical subjects of inquiry cannot be manipulated to test hypotheses as can those of the natural sciences.
  3. The third point is one that Kosso criticizes in his article: it is the common view that since historical events “are dead and gone, they are not amenable to observation.” Historians are like the jury at a criminal trial: they can listen to the testimony of witnesses but they can never see the crime itself.

But, argues Kosso, that third statement is misleading. The pastness of the phenomena that historians study is “not an epistemically significant factor in the process of our observation.”

Thus, “No Egyptologist has ever seen Ramses,” but particle physicists routinely observe the telltale tracks of electrons.

But here is the deep flaw in that analogy according to Kosso:

it is based on a mismatch between the objects of theoretical interest in history, for example Ramses, and the evidence, the tracks, for objects of theoretical interest in physics. (p. 23 – highlighting is mine in all quotations)

What would be a more accurate comparison? Either a comparison between studies of Ramses himself and studies of electrons themselves; or, a comparison between the evidence we have for Ramses (textual, archaeological) and the evidence we have for electrons (the tracks in a bubble chamber).

The interesting comparative analysis then is of the link, in each case, between the objects of interest and their image as shown in the evidential objects. (p. 23)

We come now to the quotation with which we opened this post,

no claim is above the requirement of justification (p. 26)

The scientist who proposes a description or theory on the basis of what the instruments have indicated about something — via electron microscopic image, seismic waves, ultrasonic image — that is invisible to the human eye will not, every time he or she speaks, explain how each point is justified by a particular reading of a particular program with known conditions, etc, but that background information is vital nonetheless and the scientist as a professional will always be able to produce whenever questioned about it.

Scientific observation, in other words, is observation, all things considered. It depends on an understanding of how the image was formed, that is, how the information got from the object of an observation report to the reporter. Only then is it reasonable to accept the report as reliable. (p. 27)

Particle Tracks In Bubble Chamber

For a claim to be justified among scientists they must understand the principles by which a bubble chamber, a seismometer, a particle accelerator, a radio telescope detect information and how that information is interpreted. Much of the data collected is indirectly derived from the objects and recorded in what, to the untrained eye, look like meaningless lines and splotches. And before that end product of lines and splotches, there will have been earlier stages in the transmission of information involving various unfocussed images and electrical pulses that are in themselves unrecognizable as information. So what counts as information at the end of the process must include an understanding of how that data was derived.

Kosso refers us to Maxwell’s continuum of our increasing indirectness of observation of the natural world: personal spectacles are necessary for some of us simply to see a tree or house in focus; microscopes and telescopes distort the “natural” image for us to gain more insight into an object; then we have other instruments that register different kinds of waves beyond the light spectrum. Similarly, Kosso notes,

Historical observing involves a continuum of observability similar to Maxwell’s continuum. In the historical case there is an increasing indirectness in the observation of an event due to its distance in the past and the amount of mediation of information. (p. 30)

As scientific data is filtered through a range of indirect processes that observers must understand in order to best evaluate the results of their instruments, so historians have similar challenges with the interpretation of their data:

Atkinson, citing David Hume, suggests (and subsequently opposes) that “Statements about the past are claimed necessarily to diminish in credibility as time goes on. First observation, then memory, then first-, second-, third-hand testimony, and so on to the point of complete incredibility.” This scale of credibility of information will have more epistemological significance if it is sensitive not simply to how many stages are involved in the transmission of information but to the nature of those stages and their reliability for conveying information accurately. Thus one’s own memory may be no more credible than the testimony of an eyewitness, especially a witness with independent credentials as a competent, reliable, and even expert observer. This testimony is little different from a newspaper account by a reporter on the scene, which is in turn similar to an historical account, such as Thucydides’ description of the Peloponnesian wars, where the witnessing and faithful recording of the events are independently accountable. The point is that objects of historical interest, like objects of scientific interest, fill out a tight spectrum in terms of indirectness in the process of observation. Rather than drawing a dubious dichotomy in this spectrum it is epistemologically more enlightening to analyze the various kinds of stages in the indirectness and their potential threat to the conveyance of information. (pp. 30-31)

So if we follow the comparison with Maxwell’s continuum of observability in the sciences (from eye-glasses to Hadron colliders) we find that we have a continuum of degrees of clarity in the traces of historical events. The question to ask is not, “Can we observe Ramses?” but

Ask instead, Is this information of the event and does it come to us through interaction with the event? How is the information transmitted? Is there a reliable, independent account of the flow of information? (p. 31)

That’s worth highlighting again:

Is this information of the event and does it come to us through interaction with the event? How is the information transmitted? Is there a reliable, independent account of the flow of information?

In detail, that means the following for the historian and anyone interested in researching history:

Historical studies, no less than the sciences, are able to deal with these questions of information and accountability and are therefore able to analyze and use observation reports as do the sciences. In the case of written information from the past, the historical record, accounting claims are a standard part of the case for credibility of the evidence.

One ought to know, for starters, whether the information from the past has been intentionally passed on by the author, as in explicit chronicles or histories, or is unintended information which has been teased out of documents of the times by our reading between the lines and noting presuppositions or implications of the text. Attending to this unintended evidence in texts, looking “not for what their authors wanted to say, but for the unarticulated assumptions they carry with them,” not only increases the informational content but makes it more difficult for the authors to deceive or mislead. The background understanding of the intent behind textual evidence, in other words, helps account for the reliability of the information by describing aspects of the process by which the information was conveyed. The advice of M. I. Finley for assessing the credibility of textual evidence, “The first questions to be asked of any written source are, why was it written, why was it published?” initiates the process of accounting . . . (pp. 31-32, my formatting)

There are other questions to ask, too. What were the circumstances of the interaction between the event how the information came to us: how did the author know about the event? what has happened to the text in the hands of editors and copyists since it was composed? what do we know about the author, his status, his interests?

Whence Objectivity?

And don’t look for or complain about the lack of “objective accounts”. But do look for independent verification or “external controls”.

The objectivity of evidence is secured not by using foundational, indubitable observational claims, for there are none.

Objectivity comes with the prevention of circularity in the accounting whereby a claim of evidence contributes to its own verification. If an author describes things which can be evidenced in alternative ways, as Pausanius writes of monuments and topography which can be seen in the archaeological record, there is this independent check on his credibility in general. References to one author by another, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes the historical method of Thucydides, and coincidence of an author’s account with inscriptional reports, where the dating and authenticity of the inscription can be verified by independent means, both contribute to the assessment of the credibility of the textual information from the past. The reports from past historians, like the observation reports in science, must come with independent accounting claims if they are to be responsibly accepted as evidence. (p. 32)

What we read, then, in Josephus or Herodotus is not a focused image of the past. No. What we get is an “information-bearing signal” of something in the past that has begun with certain events, and been conveyed through various interactions that lead to us. That is Kosso speaking, but I would add a further point to be aware of: sometimes a signal can appear to be about a past event but is in fact a false signal. The historian must attempt to establish if what he or she is observing is “a false-positive”. It took a long time before historians came to understand that the accounts of the Trojan War and the Worldwide Flood were myths.

In sum…

For the historian, then, the text

…. is not a light signal and it is very slow, but neither of these features disqualifies observational information in the case of science, nor should it in the historical case. What counts for observational information in science is that it gets to the observer by interaction with the object and that there is a credible account of the interaction. The same standards can apply in history. (p. 33)

To encapsulate the comparison:

The point is that the data in history, the tokens of written reports of the past, play an evidential role that is similar to the data in science, the images in microscopes, tracks in particle detectors, and the like. Both bear information of less accessible objects of interest and both are amenable to an analysis of the credibility and accuracy of that information in terms of an independent account of the interactions between the object and the final medium of information, an account, that is, of the formation of the image. As long as we understand the formation process, in science or in history, we can be quite liberal in allowing many kinds of signals to carry the information. (p. 33)

And that last sentence applies especially to ancient history where we find historians using all kinds of sources, not just ancient historians but even poets and playwrights to attempt to get a better handle on, say, an inscription unearthed by archaeologists.

And a word here for biblical apologists:

As with empirical evidence in science, the important epistemic standard is independence between the accounting claims and the benefactors of the evidence. (p. 34)

How does a researcher who prays to the resurrected Jesus spoken of in gospels do serious research into “the historical Jesus”? What would we make of an Egyptologist who was known to communicate — privately, of course — with the eternal pharaohs whose spirits had been immortalized in the pyramids?

What is necessary at all times is that the observer, scientist or historian, be able to see that the information has been “transferred by some accountable chain of interaction.”

all informational claims must have some justification (p. 34)

We think of science as being more theory-laden than history but that is an error. Theory, values, … these determine all our observations, our selections of topics of interest. Our background knowledge similarly determines our selection of topics of interest, how we interpret it and how we justify our observations and conclusions.

Kosso is writing about historical inquiry. I think the principles apply to anything we read. “All information claims must have some justification.”


Kosso, Peter. “Observation of the Past.” History and Theory 31, no. 1 (February 1992): 21. https://doi.org/10.2307/2505606.



2021-05-02

Getting History for Atheists Wrong (Again – and not just Probably) — #2

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by Neil Godfrey

Tim O’Neill makes a statement about history that I have never encountered in any work by any historian explaining to readers what he or she does. The only persons I have heard make the claim come from theological faculties when they try to place the evidence for Jesus on the same (or even higher) level that we have for other historical persons and events. O’Neill points his listeners to the title of his presentation: Did Jesus Exist? Yes (Probably) (link is to the 28 minute youtube video I am discussing). O’Neill explains:

It is … important to note the word “probably” in my answer to the question of whether this historical Jesus existed. Unlike some of the sciences, history can rarely arrive at definitive answers. . . . Historians are like detectives who examine evidence . . . and work out what probably happened. So when it comes to the pre-modern world, the sources, texts, passing references and documents and perhaps archaeology the historians analyse make it impossible for them to do more than than assess what is most likely. (from about 3 min 22 secs into the program)

Anyone who reads any work by historians discussing what they do will recognize that that remark is totally confused about what is the nature of history and the sorts of conclusions that can be drawn from the evidence — at least according to professional historians. At the very best the description might, with some slight modification, apply to a very narrow range of inquiries some historians undertake.

O’Neill continues:

People who like definite answers or proof are usually going to find ancient history pretty frustrating or perhaps disappointing. This means we can’t prove Jesus existed. But scholars can and do conclude that his existence makes most sense.

Given that we cannot give a definitive answer to the question there should be no surprise to learn that there’s no single piece of relevant evidence that definitely shows a historical Jesus existed. . . . The conclusion he most likely did exist depends on several vectors of evidence converging on that as the most likely conclusion.

I – nor you – have never read in a history book that “Rome probably or most likely — we can’t prove it, but it seems most likely from the convergence of several vectors of evidence — once had an empire stretching from Spain to Mesopotamia”, or “Julius Caesar probably existed and was probably assassinated”, or “A probable Spartacus probably led a probable slave rebellion and was probably defeated”.

Where there are questions with unclear answers, historians don’t fudge the odds and say “probably” if there is reason to doubt. They debate, or suspend judgement, or take clear sides because the evidence that does exist convinces them one way or the other. Did the ancient Greeks practice human sacrifice in historical times? Was the practice of temple prostitution practised in the ancient Near East? Did slaves build the pyramids? When questions like these were asked by historians, historians set out what they believed to be their answers — affirmative or negative — and cited the evidence supporting their beliefs. They didn’t fudge with a “probably”. Being intellectually honest types they were willing to concede that they were wrong and ready to change their minds when presented with new evidence or arguments. But that is still taking clear cut sides. It is not a position of “probability”.

Most history is narrative history. The facts are known and the problem for the historian is to decide how best to interpret them and judge the role they played in a narrative about, say, the lead up to a war, or progress toward social changes. That’s where “probably” enters the thinking. Would World War 1 have broken out even if the Archduke of Austria had not been assassinated? Probably. Was the Archduke assassinated? No probably about it.

Eric Hobsbawm

But enough of my words. Hear/read it from some renowned historians themselves:

Eric Hobsbawm

I strongly defend the view that what historians investigate is real. The point from which historians must start, however far from it they may end, is the fundamental and, for them, absolutely central distinction between establishable fact and fiction, between historical statements based on evidence and subject to evidence and those which are not.

There is a postmodernist question about truth but even here we are not dealing with probability but with whether objective truth can be known or not.

It has become fashionable in recent decades, not least among people who think of themselves as on the left, to deny that objective reality is accessible, since what we call ‘facts’ exist only as a function of prior concepts and problems formulated in terms of these. The past we study is only a construct of our minds. One such construct is in principle as valid as another, whether it can be backed by logic and evidence or not. So long as it forms part of an emotionally strong system of beliefs, there is, as it were, no way in principle of deciding that the biblical account of the creation of the earth is inferior to the one proposed by the natural sciences: they are just different. Any tendency to doubt this is ‘positivism’, and no term indicates a more comprehensive dismissal than this, unless it is empiricism.

In short, I believe that without the distinction between what is and what is not so, there can be no history. Rome defeated and destroyed Carthage in the Punic Wars, not the other way round. How we assemble and interpret our chosen sample of verifiable data (which may include not only what happened but what people thought about it) is another matter.

O’Neill compared historians to detectives. Hobsbawm extends that analogy to its logical conclusion: Continue reading “Getting History for Atheists Wrong (Again – and not just Probably) — #2”


2020-11-20

Understanding Historical Evidence

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Steve Mason

Speaking of Steve Mason’s historical inquiry into what we can reconstruct of the origins of the Jewish War from Josephus, here are some quotations I marked as I read his second chapter. I hope to post one more time on this book, sharing some specifics of how he approached Josephus’s writings as historical sources. I began an archive listing key posts on historical methods and the nature of history more generally but Ouch!, I see that I haven’t worked on it since the day I started it! I need another time out but not from illness or injury this time. I’ll be adding this post there before the archive is finished.

Anyway, here are the things Steve Mason has to say about principles of historical research. There’s nothing new here for many of us, but they are points worth keeping in mind and sharing with others who are less familiar with what it’s all about.

Don’t just dive into a historical source and grab hold of whatever statements in it look useful tidbits for telling us what happened. First examine the source, see what sort of writing it is. We can’t merely assume a work that looks like history really is what most of us think a work of history should be. In Mason’s words,

In principle all survivals from the past, material or literary, need first to be understood for what they are if we are to use them to answer other questions. (60)

Don’t dismiss literary analysis of a source as irrelevant to your search for historical information in a source. Literary analysis at some level must come first before one knows how to interpret what one reads. That’s true even at the most basic level: e.g. is our source a diary or a parable?

A problem relevant to this chapter is the notion that those who care about the meaning of texts must be literary types unconcerned with the actual past. (61)

Here are “the most basic principles underlying this inquiry into the Jewish War.” The bolding and sometimes the layout are mine.

1. “Until someone can show otherwise, I am happy believing X. …”

1. Outside the academy, history seems most often to be equated with the past itself or with supposedly authoritative records. (61)

The past no longer exists. We need to interpret sources and with those interpretations re-imagine bits and pieces of the past and continue to revise our imaginations of the past as we learn more.

Each historian uncovers a new angle and offers it as a better key to understanding, but this very activity of constant reimagining means that we are not in a position simply to learn the facts and lessons of history. We are required instead to think, explore, and judge: not to hear what the past is itching to tell us but to investigate for ourselves.

History, then, is the process of methodical inquiry into the human past. (62)

Continue reading “Understanding Historical Evidence”


2020-11-13

Bad History for Atheists (1) — Louis Feldman on Justin’s Trypho and “proving Jesus existed”

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

I took time out last night to follow up a comment left on Vridar and listen to Derek Lambert’s MythVision interview with Tim O’Neill, author of the blog History for Atheists. If one sets aside the revealing psychological portrait that emerges from the  incidental comments O’Neill lets drop about himself throughout the interview and focuses on his message one finds an unfortunate mix of contradictions, logical fallacies and factual errors presented with a confidence that evidently many readers find persuasive. I will attempt to deal with just one or two points per post to illustrate why readers and viewers need to put on their critical hats and examine carefully some of O’Neill’s claims.

Louis Feldman

In this post we look at what O’Neill has to say about the late Josephan specialist Louis Feldman, who came to reject the authenticity of any part of the Testimonium Flavianum (the passage about Jesus in Book 18 of Josephus’s Antiquities), and in particular at what O’Neill has to say about Feldman’s claim that a second century passage in a Dialogue with Trypho points to some debate at the time about the existence of Jesus.

Here is the Trypho passage.

But Christ—if he has indeed been born, and exists anywhere—is unknown, and does not even know himself, and has no power until Elias come to anoint him, and make him manifest to all. And you, having accepted a groundless report, invent a Christ for yourselves . . .

Justin’s Dialogue (ch.8)

Mythicist Earl Doherty acknowledged the passage’s ambiguity:

As I discuss at length in Appendix 12 of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, the typical historicist argument over this passage is that Trypho “is arguing that Christians invented a false conception of Christ and applied it to Jesus” (so Eddy and Boyd in The Jesus Legend, p.170). But the language is far from this specific. And it is not Trypho who is assuming Jesus existed, but Justin, who is creating the dialogue and putting into Trypho’s mouth what he himself believes and to further the argument he is constructing.

But it does suggest that Justin is countering something that contemporary Jews are claiming, and the quotation is sufficiently ambiguous to suggest even to a committed historicist scholar like Robert Van Voorst (Jesus Outside the New Testament, p.15, n.35) that “This may be a faint statement of a non-existence hypothesis, but it is not developed . . . ” (It is not developed because that is not part of Justin’s purpose.) The “groundless report” may allude to an accusation that the entire Gospel story with its central character was indeed fiction.

(Doherty, on Vridar)

But O’Neill does not allow for any reasonable ambiguity and suggests that Feldman has fallen victim to senility for disputing the common interpretation of the passage.

The Intolerability of Ambiguity?

About 20 minutes in O’Neill professes adherence to the truism of the need to be tolerant of ambiguity in the evidence. The claim is made that “mythicism” appeals to people with a certain type of psychology, to those “who don’t like ambiguity”, who “want absolutes”, who “shun ambiguity and shades of grey”. About an hour in, he repeats “I am used to ambiguity”, to evidence that can be “read in different ways”, and that certain others “find ambiguity really weird”.

The sentiment is laudable. But when discussing a particular point of evidence that is clearly ambiguous O’Neill (around the 46-47 minute mark) unfortunately dismisses as blatantly wrong, as “a bad misreading, quite a remarkable, actually, misreading”, the interpretation that draws attention to its ambiguity.

Worse is the ad hominem: O’Neill goes so far as to suggest that the interpreter’s judgment was evidence of senility:

The problem with Feldman switching sides late in his life is … to be honest, I don’t think he was firing on all cylinders, he was in his eighties at that point, and also I think that his premise [is] on the misreading of a text.

Towards the end of the interview O’Neill declares that he believes in the importance of “reading books” and becoming familiar with “critical scholarship”. Again, a laudable sentiment. But had he done so in the case of Feldman’s claim about Trypho he would have known that Feldman did not somehow come to “remarkably misread” the text of Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho “late in his life” but had published the exact same point twenty years earlier.

When O’Neill refers to Paget’s criticism of Feldman’s “misreading” of Trypho, all he is doing is pointing to a blunt single sentence that says, without any argument or justification, that Feldman has “misread” the passage:

Feldman’s attempt to argue that Justin, Dial. 8 witnesses to such an argument is a misreading of the passage.

(Paget, 602)

No argument. Just a bald assertion that Feldman is wrong.

Here is what Feldman wrote, the argument he penned (when in his 80s) about the passage: Continue reading “Bad History for Atheists (1) — Louis Feldman on Justin’s Trypho and “proving Jesus existed””